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Wildlife Cruise or Renting a Car in Ushuaia


angeleyes27
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For our shore excursion in Ushuaia, we now have Wildlife cruise & Tierra Del Fuegi National Park. Is anyone taking this or has taken this? I was thinking of changing this to renting a car and driving to the park. If anyone is doing this, what car companies are close and is the driving all paved? Has anyone done this before? Thank you. I tend to like going at my own pace (usually faster than tour buses with more photo stops).

 

 

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We rented a car from Alamo and drove to Tierra del Fuego. We picked Alamo because it was the first car rental agency I could find online that was near the port and didn't require pre-payment (important because this is one of those ports that is sometimes skipped due to weather). Alamo is about 6 blocks from the pier. There are several agencies in town that might be a little cheaper. We passed one on the way to Alamo called Localiza. Our car rental was about $130, including refueling.



It was an easy 15 minute drive to Tierra del Fuego. They give you a map of the park when you enter. We parked in the lot at the end of the park and walked several trails. I think we walked 7 or 8 miles of trails.

We then drove back toward the park entrance and visited the Post Office at the end of the world.

All roads are paved and in good shape.

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  • 2 months later...

A third option are the plenty of taxis waiting for passengers to disembark ;) We actually secured a driver before our cruise - recommended on other sites by previous cruisers. We were a group of 4 (found another couple from our roll call to share) and our amazing driver / guide drove us all over the place to key places of interest at our own pace.

 

Photos of areas visited and short description here: https://baskeytravels.com/ushuaia-argentina/

 

Again - there were many taxi drivers looking for business when we arrived, but we were super happy with the pre-arrangement with our driver / guide.

 

Heather

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Just to give you the 3rd perspective...we took a ship's tour to the park. We really enjoyed it since we got the history and some interesting views. The park roads were largely dirt and windy but the tour bus had no problem. They knew where to go and didn't waste time looking for the best views. If you are just interested in hiking then I can see the advantage of a rental car though.

 

We had plenty of time to explore Ushuaia after the tour. It's an expensive little place. Prices at the Park gift shop were high too.

 

The sign that reads 'end of the world, etc' is a very popular photo stop. Everyone wants a picture of themselves in front of it. Somehow our tour guide was able to shoo people away enough so that we got one with just the two of us. Sounds like a small thing but there were a LOT of people standing around at the time.

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Wildlife Cruise from Ushuaia: We've done this boat tour in the Beagle Channel during the morning on two different port calls at Ushuaia, and were very pleased. Good scenery, many seabirds and seals, including close approaches to seabird & seal colonies. We did these tours as ship's tours of approx. 2.5 or 3 hours duration, but it appeared that similar "wildlife cruises" were also available to anyone as independent tours. The boats used for these tours dock within a few-minute walk of the cruise ship dock. Anyone interested in the birds should bring binoculars and a bird ID book; "Birds of Chile" by Alvaro Jaramillo is very good and reasonably compact. Also, though the boats we were on had comfortable inside space, viewing was much better from the open deck, but cool/wet weather gear was needed for that.

 

On one port call at Ushuaia, we combined a "wildlife cruise" in the morning plus a ship's tour into the Nat. Park in the afternoon. Again, that could no doubt have been done independently. On a different port call, we happily combined the morning wildlife cruise with an afternoon spent wandering around the town, museum (Museo del Fin del Mundo), etc.

 

J-D

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We did the wildlife cruise and park tour. I had been thinking of cancelling it because I like being independent. But it turned out to be wonderful. The cruise had spectacular scenery for those that like scenery. The roads we saw at the park were mainly dirt and dusty. The park areas we stopped at were very pretty. Some of the other areas didn’t seem as great. However we are not the biggest hikers so that wasn’t that important to us. But we thought the tour was great

 

 

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In December 2016 we were scheduled to do a wildlife cruise but it got cancelled about 30 minutes before the cruise due to high winds and waves (while we - a group of 4 - were all disappointed, we had been nervously watching the sea conditions deteriorate in front of us). Our excursion company (Patagonia Adventure Explorer) immediately offered to return payments on the spot or arrange a private van tour of the Park at a lower rate than the wildlife cruise. We chose the latter and had 10 people in the van and an excellent guide. If was an enjoyable and informative afternoon.

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We were a group of 6 and scheduled 3 separate tours with tourguideushuaia.net. The Ushuaia tour was discounted 10 percent since we had 3 tours scheduled. The guides for all of the tours spoke excellent English. They were all extremely knowledgeable with respect to the history and nature of their locations. The tours were well planned, vans were well sized and very comfortable. In every case the guides adjusted the tours to our needs and desires and each of the tours exceed all of our expectations. I highly recommend using Edgar's agency. I am confident that you will pleased with this company.

Edited by Gphanton
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