So on this day we woke up at 6AM to a very rainy day in Ushuaia and decided it was best not to go to Tierra del Fuego National Park because of how bad the weather was. We wouldn’t be able to see anything because of the heavy cloud cover that were shrouding the tops of the mountains. So we slept in for the first time on our entire trip until about 9:30AM. We helped ourselves to some breakfast, though it wasn’t very good (stale toast and cake, jam and butter that weren’t very good, and something they tried to pass off as dulce de leche).
I then discovered that I was, in fact, charged ATM fees from my bank withdrawals that I made in Punta Arenas. The WiFi at Yakush was awful so we decided to go to the Paseo del Fuego Mall to kill some time and see if they had WiFi so I could get this bank situation straightened out. Well I won’t bore you with the details but Bank of America never picked up and I didn’t manage to figure out what was wrong with my account until much later into our trip.
We basically did nothing all day except stay in the hostel and catch up and many things (like writing blogs) and recharging all of our batteries before we started our journey back home. In retrospect, we should have just left because we just wasted the day in the hostel and paid for it, it would have been good if we could’ve gone to the park but it was raining too much . Also Ushuaia just isn’t a very nice city unless you have a lot of money to spend on crazy excursions and hotels. The landscape is pretty, but after you’ve been through all of Patagonia it’s not so great.
So I will take this opportunity to talk about Yakush Hostel. As I said in the previous post, Yakush is located on the main street of downtown Ushuaia, Avenida San Martin. It is near many restaurants, small markets, and shops. The price is fairly average compared to the rest of the hostels we stayed at in Argentina, AR$120 per person per night. The facility, however, isn’t in the best shape. The rooms were fairly big, which was nice, with 3 bunk beds allowing for 6 people per room. The communal kitchen was very large with a lot of seating area but wasn’t kept very well maintained. There was always food everywhere and the utensils were very flimsy. I don’t know if it was because of the guests or the hostel didn’t clean it very well but I always felt uncomfortable going to the kitchen. There was a small breakfast included, as there were in all of our hostels, but this one was probably the worst. It was the basic toast, corn flakes, coffee and butter, dulce de leche, or jam, but the toast was pre-toasted for you and generally very hard and stale and the condiments were communal so I felt wary about it. In general it was alright but I preferred to wait until the kitchen was free to prepare my own meal.
The staff at the hostel was also not very friendly or very helpful, they were OK but not nearly as good as the other people we encountered in other cities. Also they have this one “storage room” that STINKS of rotten meat that makes you want to throw up. I don’t know what they had going on there at the time we went but it was just an awful smell and we had to keep some of our luggage there before checking in and I could not bare to stand near the door for more than a few seconds. The biggest complaint I had with this hostel was that the bathrooms were downstairs. It was very awkward because the bathrooms were located near the front door and I always felt uncomfortable going to shower or use the bathroom. It was always very cold because there was a draft coming through and also the bathrooms were not proportionate to the amount of people who stayed at the hostel. There were just 5 shower stalls and 5 or 6 bathroom stalls, which wasn’t nearly enough for the amount of people staying at the hostel. I never had any problems because I always showered at off times of the day but I was almost never alone in the bathroom. In general, Yakush Hostel was not the worst place I’ve ever stayed in but they could definitely improve in many areas or at least reduce the prices.
###Numbers:
- AR$183 = Market
- AR$250 = Gas [AR$6.8/L] ← cheapest from our whole trip
- AR$150 = Pizza
- Total = AR$583