We are boarding our trip to Antarctica tomorrow, and are currently in Ushuaia for 3 days having flown from Buenos Aires. We’ve never posted on CC before but used it extensively for previous pretrip cruise advice and support, especially for independent traveller advice. As background, we’ve cruised many times on multiple lines, even this trip started Transatlantic from Southampton on Sillouette and ends with a week on Regent’s Mariner in Carribean.
This is however predominantly about the port of Ushuaia, which we struggled to find much information on.
For anyone looking at the choice between “flyby” big ship cruises or the expedition ship actual landing on Antarctica, please factor in the value of the chance to have a 2-3 days here. It’s a beautiful area, and has really surprised us. The value is outstanding and we genuinely believe as a stand-alone destination it should be classed in the same way as boarding in Rome, Athens, Rio or Vancouver. Places where local pre and post trips are as much a part of the cruise as the actual shipboard experience.
For those having Ushuaia as a port stop, the options are a relatively simple choice, due to geography and available on shore time. It’s explore East….Or West …. Or Cruise Beagle Channel. For those with 2/3 days all are obviously possible.
We spent our 1st afternoon west of the city, in the National Park area. The headline tourist “attraction” is a little train, research on it had been very polarised between good & bad, and it had been parked in the “try it if we don’t find anything better” box. We actually started the afternoon just planning to get a taxi to the end of the world post office, to send old school postcards to the grandkids. It’s about 20km from city, but drives past the railway stations and line. Trust us, it’s rediculously short, and for the tour charges appears pretty bad value, in a great value environment. We’re really glad we hadn’t prebooked and consider a bullet was dodged!
What was apparent though, was the local knowledge of our taxi driver (literally hailed off Ushuaia street), in the 30 minute ride to the post office, he was constantly pointing stuff out. Flora, fauna, mountains, the history of how Ushuaia has developed etc. He wasn’t a taxi driver he was a tour guide…and a dammed good one at that! Certainly in the top 3 we can remember. He never tried to upsell us, so while we were sorting and writing cards to post, we decided to ask him about taking us around the other bits of the National Park for the rest of the afternoon. He then gave us the most wonderful 4hr private guided tour through the NP, seeing all the possible places the commercial tours mention and many more where the buses are too large to stop at. He even gave us a lesson on tree fungus when I showed him a photo I’d taken earlier, proceeded to find much bigger examples, and stopped at a random old house that had used it as decorative woods as part of their fence! All of this was provided for $60 for 3 in his car. The fare to the post office (and back) was due to be $20. Now obviously prices in Argentina fluctuate MASSIVELY on daily, and weekly basis, even as we’ve been in the country for 5 days the exchange rates chanaged 10%, so please don’t assume that price is constant, we just wanted to give an indication for clarity.
In conversation, it turns out he’s one of only a handful of Ushuaia taxi drivers who speaks English, so we got very lucky. This is certainly verified by our other experiences, since our Spanish is non existent!
If anyone is traveling to Ushuaia and wants his WhatsApp details just let us know, we want this guy to get the business and reputation that his skills deserve. We will always see meeting him as a very fortunate accident, he had no real idea of cruise critic etc, but we told him how accurate and honest reviews can be on here.
His name is Mario Miraglia. and of Italian descent but lived in Ushuaia for over 30 years.
