After spending one last night on the boat in the port of Ushuaia, we woke up and vacated our stateroom at 7:30 am. We took a 20-minute shuttle bus ride to the airport to catch our charter flight. 

Imagine a small local airport that has only 6 gates, and then a series of shuttle buses drops off 200+ people at the front door all at the same time. Needless to say, the line for security was insanely long. The airport is relatively new, and it is a beautiful design, all heavy timber construction.

There were several Viking crew members that were headed home for the holidays, and they were at the gate with us. They were the last ones to board the plane and their seats were in the very back, and as they walked through the plane to their seats, all of us Viking guests gave them a long round of applause. It was well deserved. All of the crew were really amazing on this voyage.

The flight was annoying because we were tired and hungry. The food and drink service was minimal, and there was enough turbulence that we were cranky when we landed. Plus, Chad had developed a terrible head cold the last two days on the ship, so he was feeling really miserable and dealing with lots of congestion and pressure from the altitude.

We landed at 2 pm and went to baggage claim. As the bags came around, Chad grabbed his backpack, but mine never showed up. Apparently, only half of the passenger bags made it onto the plane. Viking didn’t know where the bags were. The airline didn’t know where the bags were. Nobody knew when the bags would arrive.

The second charter plane arrived late that afternoon, and some of the missing luggage (but not all) was on that plane. Luckily, my backpack was on that flight, and after standing around the airport for 4-1/2 hours, I finally had my bag. But you can imagine the epic amounts of crankiness at this point.

We hopped into a taxi to go to our AirBnB, and the 25-minute ride took over an hour. In the end, we made it into our apartment just before 8 pm and had to rest and decompress for a bit.

I knew that we needed to get to a grocery store to get a few things like bottled water. (Visitors aren’t supposed to drink the tap water here because our bodies aren’t used to the local water.) There is a huge supermarket a couple of blocks away, so we got water, a bottle of wine, and some prepared foods for dinner. We didn’t have the energy for a restaurant meal.

What was interesting, is that we were at the store at 9 pm on a Saturday night, and it was packed! People generally eat the evening meal here at 9 pm or later, so maybe everyone was picking up some stuff for dinner.

We came back to our little apartment, had some food, and went to bed. After a long day, we were wiped out and ready to get some rest and wake up and start anew in the morning.