2014/01 Chile trip - Isla Magdalena |
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Thursday January 30th
We said our goodbyes to fellow travelers and our guides. I got a big hug from Pauli, granddaughterly of course. There were about a dozen of us on the morning bus. Some left us at Puerto Natales, Russ and Anita got off at the airport, but about half were joining us at the Hotel Ilaia in Punta Arenas, where we were welcomed back with hugs.
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Isla Magdalene |
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The day was spotting with rain, windy and cool, but we had a few missions. We needed more pesos, and some stamps for our postcards. The stamps we
bought were large enough that there was little space left for messages! We booked up for a ferry trip to Isla Magdalena in the morning.
Friday January 31st
We had an early start, taking a taxi to the ferry terminal. There we found the 50 year old ferry Melinka, retired and now used just for tourists to visit the Isla Magdalena and its colony of Magellanic penguins. It was comfortable enough, half full with a hundred passengers, mainly Chilean. The ferry had an illuminated shrine, but, hopefully, prayer wouldn’t be necessary. The 
day was perfect with little wind and no swell, about as calm as the Straits of Magellan ever get, a lot easier trip than Magellan and Drake had back in the 1500s. The island is about twenty miles from the terminal; the trip took two hours each way and we had an hour on the island.
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Isla Magdalena penguins (23.49) |
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The island has a hill in the middle with a lighthouse, but the rest belongs to tens of thousands of penguins and an assortment of gulls, petrels, skuas, and cormorants. Some of these feed off the penguins, particularly the eggs and young. Every dot in the lighthouse picture is a bird and most are penguins.
Humans have to keep to a roped path but penguins can wander everywhere and frequently shared the path with us. It 
was very noisy; these Magellanics are also known as jackass penguins because of their braying. The males spread 
their wings out, puff their chests, tilt heads back, and let fly with a jackass yodel. Biologists refer to it as an “ecstatic display”; to me it looks more like a hallelujah moment among the Southern Baptists. In the group picture two were braying at once, but they weren’t at all in sync.
The young were nearly grown but still had their juvenile plumage. They were hanging around the burrows while the 
parents, who share the feeding, rush out to sea and come back full of food. In the picture the adult is preening its 
chick. Some other chicks were lying around on the beach. With the braying and beak clicking, digging holes, stealing nesting materials from the neighbours, and recreational sex, it was just like a town of humans.
A breeze had come up and it was cold on the island ; we’d need our long undies if it was like this on the Falklands. It 
was all over in an hour; all of us humans had departed, but another boat had arrived to take our place. The penguins would just go on with their lives.
Back at the terminal, it was warmer and we walked a few miles of sea wall back to town. Even the riprap in this town is artistic: giant cubes of coloured concrete randomly piled to withstand erosion.
There were more surprises, like this lupine bush, one of many along the sea wall, always in yellow. And this whaling sculpture.
We mailed our postcards at the central post office; there are no post boxes in Chile. But first I checked on the postage, as the Internet had implied that postcards to countries other than the USA were more expensive. So I pointed to a Canadian address and asked if the stamps were enough. “Suficiente” was the reply, but although our postcards to the USA made it, we don’t think any of the others got through. [They did in the end, about a month later than those to the USA.]
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Cafe Tapiz (1.56) |
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After all the exercise, gooey cakes went down well at the Tapiz, crowded in mid-afternoon with the local cake and 
coffee crowd. We found it to be a friendly easy-going place; happy to serve pisco sours with cake.
Our last sight in downtown Punta Arenas was this funeral procession through the streets.
On a perfectly calm evening we took a last walk down to La Marmite for some great food and those pisco sour 
slushies. In the morning we’d be taking our flight to the Falkland Islands, and this is a good point to end part one of our story.