Chile: The love-in continues

Sorry for the long gap since my last update - I've been busy doing not very much at all!

The deep, deep south

After four days of hiking in Patagonia, what I needed more than anything was a three-hour bus trip south to Punta Arenas, so we hopped on board a coach to head to the Magellan Strait. Actually, I was quite surprised that my legs were not aching as much as I expected. I think if I had done the hiking at the start of my travels, it may well have killed me, but I must have recovered some fitness somewhere along the line!

The main attraction in Punta Arenas is the penguin colony on Magdalena Island, in the heart of the Magellan Strait. (It's only fair to warn you that I'm going to keep saying Magellan Strait, no matter how repetitive it gets!) I still can't quite believe I have been to the Magellan Strait, one of the most famous stretches of water in the world - famous for being both remote and treacherous! At 53° south, the Magellan Strait, which separates the mainland of South America and Tierra del Fuego, is the most southerly place I've ever been and the farthest south that I will be going on this adventure.

As you approach Magdalena Island, you begin to see the white dots of the penguins along the shore and, as you get closer, you realise just how many there are - there are literally thousands of them. The ferry pulled into the harbour with the penguins bow-riding, jumping out of the water alongside the boat and, as we disembarked, they were belly-flopping onto the shore before waddling around the jetty. All very penguin-like: cute and funny at the same time and in equal measures.

Time for a cuddle?

We got to spend about one hour on the island; enough time for hundreds of photos, I can assure you. It is also enough time to learn that if a penguin leans forward, you should head in the other direction quickly, as they can project their shit quite a distance! The other thing you learn is that, no matter how cute they look, and how comical it seems as they waddle across the path, you don't want to get too close to them as their bite hurts! Being bitten on the calf by a penguin who decided to cross the walkway, as I was looking in the other direction, was something of a painful surprise. 

On the island, there is a marked path which take you to a lighthouse at the highest point and from where you can see the size of the colony with penguins as far as the eye can see. The island is a conservation centre too - trips like the one we were with are nowadays limited to certain times of the day so that the penguins are left to their private penguin lives for most of the time and the marked path only allows you to visit a small part of the colony.

On the return trip back to the mainland, we were treated to sightings of three humpback whales breaching the water, firing blasts of water in the air from their blowholes. All in all, an excellent day! By the way, did I mention that the island was in the middle of the Magellan Strait?!

The day after, we were due to fly back to Santiago but there was still time to (a) watch United knock city out of the cup and (b) pay a quick visit to the Punta Arenas cemetery. It sounds rather morose, but the cemetery is very beautiful. Rather than bury the dead underground, they are encased in family tombs, so there are rows and rows of grand family monuments, like a vast city of the dead, and the majority of the tombs are very well maintained and there are flowers everywhere.

Santiago

Back in the capital, it was time to say goodbye to the first group (with dinner in the Bellavista part of town, eating, what else, but sushi!) and hello to the next tour group who I would be traveling with. Well, I wasn't technically joining the next tour group - the lack of urgency with which everything is done in South America extends to the GAP office, so although I had tried to join the tour to Buenos Aires in plenty of time, they hadn't managed to confirm anything and I was simply following the route of the next tour but arranging all the travel and accommodation independently. (Which sounds easy enough, but I almost screwed up at the first stage, by sleeping through the airport pick up. I had hardly slept for a week because my roommate Jose had a bad cold and snored like a train ("Revenge!" I hear you cry!), so it was the first proper night's sleep I'd had for a while, and my body took full advantage.)

Having said that I was not technically joining the new tour, I was joining the group in all other senses, for the day trips and the nights out, so I went along to the welcome briefing to meet everybody. The group was a bit different to the last one (the tour was a "comfort" trip (read: better hotels) rather than the standard tour through Patagonia, so the target audience is a bit different) and it was interesting to see how Courtney adapted her approach to the different groups.

The first of the day trips took us to the home of the original Concha y Toro vineyard and the origin of many of my hangovers in the UK. The tour around the vineyard and cellars (including the famous Casillero del Diablo cellar) was very slick and professional, but the jokes were just too well-oiled and you know the guide must have told them a hundred times before. There were also so many cars and tour groups here - much, much more than on my visits to vineyards in Hunter Valley - so while it was good to see, it did feel a little like you were on a conveyer belt.

We did, though, go to a second winery in the area, which was excellent. Concentrating only on Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, the operation (Cavas del Raco) was tiny in comparison to Concha y Toro, but everything was done using traditional methods. The guy who showed us around was part of the family that had run the place for three generations, so he had devoted his life to wine and his undimmed enthusiasm shone through.

Puerto Varas - again

The route to Buenos Aires took me back to one of my favourite places in Chile, Puerto Varas, and gave me the chance to take a couple of the excursions that I didn't have time for last time. Even in the rain, the German looking town is very pretty, and this time I had a view of the volcanos across Lake Llanquihue from my room.

From Puerto Varas, it is a fairly short drive to Chiloe island, which is the second biggest island in Chile (at around 200km long), but generally untouched by tourism. I had spent so much time on boats in the previous few months, the thirty minute crossing across the Chacao Strait had a rather mundane feel to it when boarding, but the sight of pelicans, penguins, sea lions and cormorants on the crossing soon lifted that feeling. Once on Chiloe, we passed through Ancud (a quaint looking town built on seaweed and clam farming) before going for a traditional lunch at a local farm (cooked on hot stones, buried underneath sods of earth). The surrounding countryside was full of birds (ibis, southern lapwing, parakeet, caracara, hummingbirds etc.) and at the farmhouse, we were paid a visit by a trio of Darwin's foxes (locally known as Zorro Chilote). Much like when we saw the dolphins on the Navimag, seeing these foxes was made more special because the owners and locals were excited by seeing them: it was rare for them to be seen at all - let alone to have them wander nonchalantly through the farmhouse gardens (I've since discovered that they are critically endangered, with only around 300 left in the world - very special indeed). 

Later in the afternoon, we headed out to some smaller islands where more penguins live. The colony here is much smaller than Magdalena Island, but there are (uniquely) two species of penguin living here: the Humbolt and the Magellan. As well as the penguins, there were sea-lions basking in the sun and a sea otter swimming on its back in the rough ocean waters, devouring a crab lunch. The sea otter was definitely the highlight for me, more so than all the penguins and whales, as I have always been fascinated by them since reading Tarka the Otter as a kid. I mentioned the rough water - the waves here were some of the biggest I'd seen and our small boat was being tossed about as we circled the islands. All part of the adventure!

Back in Puerto Varas, I got to show the new group some of the places from my first trip to the town, but we also went to a couple of new bars and I ended the night clubbing with Christian and Carolina (the bars only start to fill up about 1.00 in the morning). Just because we had a six hour drive across the border into Argentina in the morning, was no reason to cut short the night, so we stayed out until the wee small hours, dancing, playing pool (the Chilean way) and, of course, drinking pisco sours. I also met a guy I had first met in the bars of Zanzibar. Small world indeed!