The end of the world

Very recently, my family and I just got back from our vacation to Tierra del Fuego, which means "earth of the fire," but it actually is the closest place to Antarctica. The town we were in is called Ushuaia. From almost anywhere you can see the Andes mountains in the distance, with snow on top, which is very cool. Even though it was summer there, we still needed to put on our coats and our hats, because it was very cold.

The first day that we were there, we rode on a chairlift up the mountain. The name of the mountain is Glaciar Martial. It was very cool to actually see snow for the first time in a while. The rest of the day we walked around the town to see all the cool things in it and also to get used to it.

The second day we were there was a very good day, but also a very bad day. I'll tell you what we did before I tell you the bad thing and the good thing. We had a long and bumpy ride in a little van to a little estancia where we would take a boat to an island. An estancia is like an old farm or ranch that has become a hotel. On the bumpy ride there I was sitting in the back and I had brought my Fishers Cube (which is a Rubik's cube that can change shape) and I was doing it for a long time, mixing it up and solving it. After a while I started getting super carsick. Then I tried to look out the window but it didn't help because it was too late and the ride was so bumpy, and eventually I threw up ten times, which was super disgusting. That, if you haven't already figured it out, was the bad part.

The good part was when we arrived at the estancia and got on the boat toward the island. The reason we wanted to get on the boat to the island is because the island had a ton of penguins, specifically magellanic penguins, with some gentoo mixed in. It was cool because we got to get close and see the penguins in their natural habitat, roaming around or staying in their nests to be with their babies. I noticed that the gentoos' nests were with rocks, and the magellanics' were holes in the ground. It was amazing that we could see so many penguins in their habitats.

The third day in the morning we went to the old prison that got turned into a museum. Before, there had been a prison there because Ushuaia is very cold and it was so separated from the rest of the world. We learned about some of the prisoners and what they did. One example is of a sixteen-year-old who was short and had humongous ears. He set many fires and killed some children, and hurt others. It was cool to see that the prison cells were so small and the uniforms of all the prisoners were blue and yellow stripes. The part that showed us most of what it used to be was the part they hadn't fixed up yet, which was super cold and super smelly and all the paint was peeling off the walls. That gave me a better look at how the prison used to be and how bad it probably was for the prisoners.

That afternoon we went on a boat trip. It was for seeing cormorants and the sea lions, and going on an island to see how the Indians lived there, so close to Antarctica. On the island it was pretty boring for me, because there wasn't much there except for plants. One thing I learned about was a little berry called "manzana del diablo", which means devil's apple. It was one of the things the Indians ate. After, we stayed on the boat to look at the different islands with sea lions and birds.

The fourth day (also the last) we went zip-lining very fast around the mountain I mentioned before. That was very fun, and I had never zip-lined before so it was a new experience. After that we went to the museum that was about the Indians that had inhabited the area of Tierra del Fuego before the Spanish people came and killed them all. The museum was okay, and the coolest and most disgusting thing I learned is that they didn't wear any clothes, even though it was super cold.