It's kind of a harsh awakening when you have been inside a bus for 37 hours, and suddenly you open your eyes at a place like Río Gallegos.

Río Gallegos is the southernmost city of Patagonia, the legendary region of interwoven mountains, open landscapes, and, they say, mirages. The city was founded in 1884 as a port, a time in which several immigrants from Italy, Spain, Ireland and England started to occupy these lands and raise cattle. It is 12 hours away from Ushuaia, my final destination. In the meantime, I had to make a quick stop here, in this city with curious attributes: gray and yellow colors, a cold wind from the coast that blows tiny black dots that look like charcoal; the city's seaport, at the time deserted, with remarkably low tides, and, without any exception, a dog in every house.

Gradually I've had the impression that I have returned to the beginning of this journey, due to the winter-like feeling of sunlight, the openness of the landscape, and the simplicity of Patagonian houses which bear some resemblance with the Anglo ones (the majority of the old houses that survive from the time of the foundation of Rio Gallegos were ordered by catalogue from Europe, in the same way that modular houses are brought today to Anchorage).

While I was walking around the three or tour semi-lively streets of Rio Gallegos, I went into the Museo Padre Molina, a curiously strange combination of natural history and modern art museum that surely would be liked by people like Mark Dion and David Wilson from the Museum of Jurassic Technology. (Father Molina was one of the first scientific collectors here, and, judging from the fact that this is the only real museum here, probably the last). Although many of the old exhibits seem to be gone, there is an imposing skeleton of a Megatherium Americanus, a “herbivore mammal, measuring more than 5 meters in length. It had strong claws. It coexisted with man. It lived during the Pleistocene. It was extinguished 8500 years ago”.