Though as usual, only with my camera. After a very long day sitting on buses and recrossing the Argentina/Chile border we arrived here early evening in time for a shower then out to have dinner. The border crossing was slower and even less efficient than the first time last week, I’m not sure how they do it, but it was probably the slowest and least efficient border crossing I’ve encountered in 44 years of travel. Complete with putting all the luggage out on the ground in a driving rain storm so the dogs could check for drugs. They weren’t very good as they missed my small supply of travel illness drugs, lol. Needless to say, our bags weighed more when we finally arrived than they did when we departed! Fortunately we pack the majority of our gear in dry bags, so everything dried out quite quickly last night. With all the delays we just barely made our bus connection in Puerto Natales by an incredible 3 minutes. The funny’s thing is that we purchased a second ticket for the connecting trip down to Puenta Areanas several days earlier given our experience with missing our outward bus connection by 2 hours. We thought that a trip that’s suppose to take 5 hours and takes 6 would be safely covered in 7. Almost wasn’t. It was cheap insurance with a $36 price tag, but had we missed the 15:00 bus we would have had to buy a third set of tickets. Clearly the message we’ve learned this travel is that schedules mean little when travelling in South America and to plan accordingly, meaning sometimes having plans B and C in your pocket: )
Later: Now sitting in Santiago in our hotel lobby. Things just getting a bit to the point where you can just laugh or cry. We arrived on Punta Areanas late last night and crawled into bed very early this morning. We woke to find emails from Air Canada telling us that our fight out tonight has been delayed until midnight. Nice. They eventually sent us a replacement ticket confirmation to Toronto, but without any ongoing reservations home. I sat on the phone waiting for their quickly evaporating customer service for 1 hour, 45 minutes listening to how they have been voted the number one airline in North America. I was finding this more difficult to believe as my Skype credit slowly depleted. When I eventually spoke with an agent he told me that they unrolled a new computer system yesterday which caused all the delays and the lack of notification about our ongoing flights. Why do major corporations continue to roll out new systems still full of bugs? My prior employer was famous for this behaviour leaving front line staff holding the bag again and again. So I wasn’t hard on the poor phone agent. Seen it before too often.
Anyway, back to the last 24 hours in Punra Areanas.
The bus did get us into town around dinner time, so after dropping our gear and showering we went out to find some seafood with great success. We ‘discovered’ a very cool place to eat which, judging by the walls, has seen loads of traffic over the years. Great wine and beer selection as well.
Look closely and you’ll see that Shackleton is a pretty big deal around here with a beer named for him. One of the interesting things we’ve seen way down south is that much of the loading of Arctic bound shipping goes on here. There are also a number of scientific research companies located in Punta Areanas, and interestingly when we saw all the bank windows shuttered up from the violent demonstrations these research places were left untouched.
Hey Seth, this dark ale was very nice. When you get down here to check out the night sky you’ll find some good beers waiting.
Early on in our trip planning Annemarie was pretty clear that she wanted to see penguins when we arrived in the south of Chile. So we touched base with a company that has access to the island where penguins colonize at this time of year to hatch their single egg and made a reservation for this popular activity. There isn’t much else to do down here from what we’ve seen. The landscape is pretty bleak and flat as a pancake. So up early at another ungodly hour and off in a timeless bus to get loaded onto a high speed boat. The whole thing reminded me of the Torino tourist scene where folks book to go see bears, whales and the natural habitat. The Europeans also flock into Patagonia for similar experiences. Mostly Germans, but also many from France and some Dutch. There are many too from Spain, but with their common language they fit in fairly seamlessly and it’s only when we speak with them that we discover where they’re from.
We see lots of sleek black seals playing just off the boat as we race past. There is almost 18 hours of daily sunlight this far south generating tremendous amounts of food in the ocean which in turn attracts the penguins and the sea lions, who in turn attract the Great White sharks that hang out in these waters. The sharks congregate in this area when the penguin and seal pups enter the water some months from now.
You can see one of the Magellan Penguin colonies above the small cliff as we approach.
There are even meeter, greeters as we step ashore!
There are even meeter, greeters as we step ashore!
To help reduce the stress on the birds we are confined to a specific trail that is roped off on each side. The guide tells us that the numbers of penguin couples are down significantly with global warming perhaps creating more rain in this area and making the nesting dens less welcoming. Nonetheless there are an estimated 17,000 couples on the island. I’m guessing that it’s probably a factor of global warming and stress caused by visitors to the island, though the ecotourism industry wouldn’t likely acknowledge this very loudly. In any event, we had no idea about the possible impact we might be causing to the penguin population before we arrived. Maybe we should have been better informed? On the island already so we walked in the pouring rain and had a look see. Thankful for our wet gear as many others were not well prepared for some reason and became pretty wet. My camera managed to also survive.
As Monty Python might say...The Penguin.
Nesting material gathering. Being use to seeing the Arctic Emperor penguins on TV I wasn’t expecting to see them nesting, as in traditional burrow nests. Very interesting.
Cute looking too.
They burrow in the ground to lay their single egg. We watched them pop in and out.
Not only were there all these welcoming penguins, but there were also many more nesting gulls on the island. Apparently unstressed by our arrival as there were loads of them. They continued on doing what nesting birds to to reproduce and hatch eggs without much notice of us. Didn’t get pooped on either!
I watched something I’d only seen on documentaries before. A predator bird arrived ,into the colony, chases away the gulls and repels their counter aggression then it calmly eats the eggs while the gulls stand by and watch. The dark bird is the bad guy.
We watched the penguins zoom around in the water as well. So fast!
Then we were off to check out the Sea Lion colonies where the males had already gathered to wait for the ladies to arrive. Quite the range of sizes with mature and immature Sea Lions present.
The guys were obviously pretty bored with just our boat to amuse them so they put on a great display of mock battles in preparation for the main event when the ladies show up.
Then we headed off again to shore and take our rickety bus back to town. Met three ladies from Capital Markets at one of the major chartered banks so we had an interesting discussion about currencies, ETF’s and boring stuff like that. It was actually a good discussion. They on the other hand had to listen to us talk about retirement. Poor ladies!
Back in town we showered and packed for our later flight and then headed out to have lunch at our new favourite place. Then a walk around town to survey the demonstration damage.
We’d again seen the tail end of yet another demonstration the night before. We are getting a much better idea of what’s going on here. Better than by watching the news on TV at home which is often channeled to the viewer to see the worst of a situation. We’ve never felt uncomfortable with what we’ve experienced, though the violence is pretty regular in Santiago and the public transportation there is still very disrupted. The only reason why we sit here and wait instead of going into town. We might not find our way back out in time for our flight.
So we sit and we wait. It’s been a magnificent travel. We’ve met so many lovely people and seen areas of our world that are like eye candy. We are already talking in general ways about our next travels including a return to South America.
Ok. We haven’t eaten in a couple of hours and it’s late lunch time. Just 9 hours until our flight...hopefully.
1 comment:
Penguins and gulls! And no poop incidents! You are a very lucky pair.
Ken
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