Ah, well, it seems the penguins were not meant to happen today. Went along to the place where the excursion could be booked, only to be told that it only went ahead if there were at least 5 people. Which there weren´t. ´¿Mañana?´ she asked. But tomorrow I´m off on the bus to Puerto Natales in Chile. Had a look at my map and decided I could easily hitch there and back myself in a day. It was about 120km and I´d heard from various people at the hostel in Ushuaia that hitching is easy here. So set off quite happily for the walk out of town and as soon as I got on the road a car stopped before I´d even had to put my thumb out. The 2 men in the van thought it was hilarious that I wanted to go to Capo Virgenes. They told me they could only drop me at the fork in the road 14 km further and asked how I was going to go after that. ´Other cars?´ I said hopefully. More hilarity. Anyway they dropped me off and I was soon picked up by a huge tanker truck. He told me he could only take me as far as he was going to deliver his petrol (or oil or whatever it was - I only understand a fraction of what people say to me). Fair enough - I asked him to point out on the map roughly where that was and he told me and said it would take 3 hours. And it was not even a third of the distance I needed to go. Ah... this was getting more complicated - I´d assumed I´d just nip along there in at most 2 hours. I still think like a European, that where there are roads there are also cars. But this road barely deserved the name. It was a dust track. With hardly any traffic. The driver was trying to tell me that really it wasn´t possible to get a lift all the way to the cape. No-one goes there. Only the excursions. Eventually I realised that it wasn´t going to work and decided to get out and turn back. We agreed that if no-one had come he would take me back to the main road on his return trip later in the afternoon. Walked for about an hour, enjoying being out in this huge empty landscape. The wind was just right, not cold, not too warm, not too strong to dislodge my cap (which I need to stop my face burning, the sun is deceptive, it doesn´t feel hot because of the wind but is therefore all the more dangerous). Then got picked up by another 2 men in a pick-up. They took me right to my hotel, after stopping for 5 minutes at the edge of town to deliver some stuff. They told me that the 2 ranches we passed (which look like nothing more than a few barns and an unimpressive house) are owned by the family Benetton. As indeed is most of the land in the area. When I was walking out of town this morning I was thinking that as I delete all the photos from my camera as soon as I´ve uploaded them to the blog I don´t have a ´hard copy´ of them anywhere. If Blogger goes bankrupt or whatever I´ll lose them all. I was thinking of asking if someone at home could somehow take them from the blog and store them on a cd when suddenly I had the brilliant idea that I can put them on my USB stick. I brought it with me with only the vaguest idea that it might be handy if someone else wanted to give me some photos from their camera, as I can´t actually use it with this camera. But I can put the photos on it after I´ve uploaded them to the computer I use to put them on the blog. At least I think I can. Off to try it when I´ve uploaded the latest lot.
