October/November (can't think of a funnier title)

Two months sure go by quick!

Hi all, I hope you can forgive me for being bad at posting consistently. 

I am writing this very hurriedly, in an attempt to publish it in the hour before I get on the boat to Antarctica. I'm sure this will be pretty incomplete, but it's definitely everything important. 

Excursion 1:  Río Grande - Porvenir

    Our first and longest excursion to date, back in the beginning of October, was a 5 day tour of Tierra del Fuego (my home at the tip of Argentina and Chile). We began by visiting Cabo San Pablo, where the merchant ship Desdemona was intentionally shipwrecked in 1983 due to poor conditions and not knowing where the sandbank was. We then went to the city of río Grande, which is definitely not on my list of places I would like to go again. It is an industrial city slightly larger than Ushuaia with some of the most unrelenting wind in the world. On the way to Porvenir, Chile on the other side of the island, we stopped at the archeological site "tres arroyos" which was the first site to fully confirm and date humanity's migration around the globe. Porvenir, while being a very small town, has one of the most complete museums of the Selk'nam, the almost extinct indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego massacred by the Spanish in the early 1900's. The trip wrapped up with a stop at the only king penguin reserve in TDF.

Excursion 2: Puerto Almanza

    This excursion near the end of October was a 1 night trip along the southern coast of Argentinian Tierra del Fuego. It was mostly a geographic tour, including an experiment in one of TDF's many peatbogs. Puerto Almanza is a fishing community of roughly 120 people, making it the island's 4th largest city! 

Independent Research Project

    The class section of this semester ended on October 31st, and the rest is conduction our own independent research projects or internships. I am working in the lab of Ushuaia's university testing the impact of lower temperatures on horticultural crops. I was definitely a little underwhelmed by this project, so I widened the scope to understanding the agricultural needs of Tierra del Fuego. The island has really horrible conditions for growing crops, so the vast majority of the fruits and vegetables are shipped frozen from northern Argentina. Everyone here seems to agree that the produce here sucks, so I've been exploring the area's challenges and potential solutions. Last week, I went back to río Grande to talk with the head of the National Institute of Technology and Agriculture in TDF. When I finish this project in December, I'll be sure to share it with you all. It will be in spanish, though, but you can put it through a translator if you would like. 

Other than all that, my time in Ushuaia has remained pretty chill. Hiking all the time has remained a constant, and some more hobbies have been picked up here and there, slacklining being the biggest.

 

In more important blog news, I can officially confirm that Colin's Blog will remain active until May of 2024! I've decided to take next semester off from college and keep traveling around South America. I'll mainly be using a site called Work Away, where people with little projects house and feed travelers for a couple weeks in exchange for a few hours of labor a day. My first stop will be just outside of Valparaíso, Chile at the end of December.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my American followers, and I'll hopefully be back in 2 weeks with pictures from the blue continent.

xoxo,

Colin

p.s. I added some pictures but I have no idea if they're viewable. If not, I promise to try them again when I get back