Ushuaia and Santiago

This morning we bid adieu to Orion and the marvelous expedition staff.  It's a partly sunny, partly cloudy, sometime light rainy day in Ushuaia.

We disembark Orion on the first day of the southern hemisphere's summer, our winter.  The group is bussed to the local 'prison/maritime museum'. The most interesting thing about the place is the painted penguins.  We would have purchased one and had it shipped to US if they sold them.

Lindblad has a hospitality suite at a local hotel that we use before we're ferried by bus to the airport for our charter flight to Santiago. With the first reliable Internet connection in more than a week, every addict in the room is glues to his or her cell phone, downloading and catching up on email.

We get a few good looks at the Andes on the approach to Santiago.  The first picture is of the mountains east of the city.  The second includes the tallest mountain outside of Asia: Aconcagua.

Why can't we get into Chile.  A cantankerous immigration agent won't let us into Chile so that we can retrieve our luggage. He won't accept that our luggage was not checked through to Miami. We nearly get arrested for abusing immigration agents (who are stupid we might add).