Why Ushuaia is a critical destination

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THIS IS my first full day here in Ushuaia and it's great not having any planes to catch after having spent two days travelling 15,000 kilometres. It's great not having to catch anything. In fact I don't need to catch any planes for at least another four weeks I think.

Today I've been exploring the beautiful city of Ushuaia with its amazing mountain backdrop and wildlife. There's a few cruise ships out there. Out there is the Beagle Channel which I hope to be doing a cruise through later today. You can see down the length of it and around the far corner is Cape Horn, the very most southern tip of South America. I won't be able to get that far today, but we'll see.

Anyway, sort of exploring through the area there are quite a lot of local people here, but everyone else seems to be tourists. There are a couple of cruise ships out there. A lot of people come on shore for the day to explore the area including this part of the coast, walking past.

The cruise ship passengers are only here for the short term. A lot of them have been up and down the Antarctic but wouldn't have had the chance to land there. That's one type of traveller I've noticed here.

Then there's two other types of traveller I've noticed here. One type of traveller I've noticed here is what I call the Antarctic Explorer. I saw quite a lot of them at the airport in Buenos Aires yesterday and they were all very well dressed up with their big coats and big laptops and big cameras obviously come here to probably not join one of these cruise boats, but take smaller ones that head off down and explore down the Antarctic Peninsula. That makes this town a real magnet for these explorers, particularly these Antarctic explorers who fly from all around the world to this little town way out here in the middle of nowhere. This city has the motto "the end of the earth" and it really is. This is the most remote and southernmost city in the world. There are a couple of small towns across the other side of the Beagle Channel but nothing anywhere near as big. Here we are about 54 degrees latitude south which is quite a long way down. There's really not much beyond here. So the Antarctic Explorers will jump on a small cruise ship and head down to the Antarctic Peninsula and will actually get to land in different places and it will be absolutely amazing for them.

The third type of traveller who comes here, and I haven't seen too many of them, they are very adventurous types who like to travel absolutely everywhere. Amongst these are a few people who have the goal of travelling the length of the Americas. Some people even walk it which would take around five to seven years I reckon. You can see the road which rings around the city I think and starts around here. If you follow the road and keep going about 20,000 kilometres you end up somewhere in Alaska pretty much where it ends. There are a couple of little breaks in the road. Around a hundred kilometres or so north of here you'll have to get a ferry across the Strait of Magellan because this is an island. Between North and South America there is a 150 kilometre gap called the Durian Gap which is extremely difficult to get through, so most people would either fly over that or perhaps bypass it around the Carribean doing cruises.

There are actually a few people who do this trip and the crazy ones walk it. Unfortunately my legs aren't up to doing that. I did the 1000 kilometre South East Queensland coast hike and that took me three years, so goodness knows how long it would take me to do a 30,000 kilometre walk. But good luck to those people doing that. I am actually following a few of them.

That being said there are a few tours you can do going all the way from here up to Alaska which I find very fascinating. Ushuaia's motto is "where the world ends" and also "where things begin", and for me this place is quite a significant base camp over the next few weeks because firstly I set a goal over this last decade to get to every single continent before the decade is over. I've now only got one more to do which is Antarctica just down there.

I mentioned before about the Antarctic Explorers, and that is what I'm going to be doing over the next two weeks. Tomorrow I'm going to be joining up with a tour group up at some hotel up the hill here somewhere, so that will be very interesting. Then I'll be heading to perhaps one of these smaller boats over here on a photography and scientific expedition tour heading off down to the Antarctic Peninsula. So you won't hear any live updates from me for about two weeks, but I'll certainly keep doing these diaries and obviously a tonne of photos as well.

So when I next get back here to Ushuaia, I will have achieved this last decade's goal of travelling to every single continent. Obviously I now live in Australia, I'm from Zealandia, which is now recognised as a continent. I've been to Asia a few times and been to Africa and this is my second trip into South America. Last year I went up into North America and one of the trips I did to Asia I ended up in Europe so I've been to every continent. I obviously haven't explored every bit of each continent but as of about two weeks time I will have been able to tick Antarctica, the last one, off my list. I've saved the best till last because Antarctica has been on the bucket list for a very long time.

When I get back here, I'm going to start my next goal which will be my primary travel goal for the next decade. That is to get from here all the way up to Alaska. I had looked at doing this in one single trip which you can do in about 8 or 9 months, but I've decided to break it up because back home I have work commitments and other things going on. So I'm going to be doing this piece by piece over this coming decade. So by the end of the 2020s I will have travelled by land from here right up to Alaska which is about 20,000 odd kilometres away. So I'm just putting that out there and this is where it all starts. This is also where the 8 continents goal finishes as well with having finished Antarctica as well as all the other continents. Then I'll start the journey up to Alaska in segments. Wish me luck in that.

In the mean time, I'm going to do a cruise on the Beagle Channel mainly for some practice on the photography I'm going to be doing on the Antarctic Peninsula over the next couple of weeks and obviously so I can explore this little area as well as I'll be very busy around the start and end of the Antarctic cruise to be doing much around here.

So that's it for the day and I'll see you tomorrow.