Magellanic penguins with fur on them are juveniles. Until they lose the fuzz they can’t swim so their parents, who mate for life, have to feed them.
Who needs that stress? This one below is getting into adulthood.
The road, provincial highway one was a wide swathe of gravel through Patagonia and I tired to find a path with the least pot holes and washboard. We aired down the tires and got going at 10 am. We arrived at the penguins at 5 pm.
It looks isolated and it is but there is a surprising amount of traffic, tanker trucks from the gas fields and pickups and vans with penguin tourists and private cars. And us.
And then Julia and Konstantin finished their morning shop and zoomed past us at suspension breaking speed. I am very conscious of my mechanical ineptitude and how far we have yet to go so I baby my van. Konstantin is much more capable and more brash. They arrived five hours before us.
Rusty enjoys the relaxed route.
Our first rhea sighting- a South American ostrich. Many more to come I think. Unlike in Chilean Tierra Del Fuego there are no guanacos wandering here.
This is Estancia Condor that apparently owns much of this land.
This is one of several oil or gas complexes. Unlike in Alaska these places are wide open and you just drive through. No security guards visible.
Have you noticed the total absence of power lines? I haven’t see power poles anywhere in this part of the world just like in Tierra Del Fuego.
And then on the horizon I saw a line of power poles between gas drilling facilities.
Tea break for me and Rusty. Layne had a Coke as we listened to the wind.
The Atlantic Ocean. This is technically a provincial park but Santa Cruz province is said to be the poorest in Argentina and ran out of money, or the will, to maintain this place so this site is abandoned and wide open to anyone intrepid enough to drive here.
The blue and white Argentine lighthouse. There is a red and white one on the Chilean side of the border a few miles away. Chile owns both sides of the entrance to the Straits of Magellan.
You may have heard of the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean and they got their name from the sane source as Cabo Virgenes did here. Magellan found this cape in 1520 on the day dedicated to Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins (the mind boggles. Are they a flock? Or a herd? Or a clutch?). So there it is. On the left is the Argentine gas exploration base at the cape and on the right is the red and white lighthouse on the Chilean side of the fence:
We drove up but there’s not much to see.
Behind the double border fence the Chilean lighthouse sits in splendid isolation.
Three miles back a chained gate at the abandoned ranger’s house is all that keeps visitors out of the penguin reserve, but it’s not locked.
Lift the chain, open the gate and the penguins are at your mercy. Have you ever had to avoid penguins while driving? I have.
Can you imagine the authorities in the US trusting the public to visit a place like this unsupervised and not trashing it?
The parking lot was packed with cars. There was not a speck of trash and everyone walked on the trail and no one harassed a penguin exactly as you should behave. It was like our mothers were watching.
And the penguins are right there, everywhere not completely fearless but within reach of the humans walking by.
Extraordinary.
The fuzzy juveniles were everywhere. If they swim their fuzz absorbs water and they drown so they can’t even feed themselves.
It was like a Disney movie being shown the way by a butler penguin.
“Don’t go on the Beach” and no one did though we have seen photos on Instagram of overlanders doing just that. Assholes.
The beach belongs to the birds:
Looking north:
Time to go home do they waddle up the sand and go inland to safety.
Rush hour. It was about six o’clock on Tuesday evening.
Off home:
They paused as we hurried past the break in the trail and after we went by they resumed their orderly trek:
Home for the night:
And a bonus sighting, I got to see an armadillo bustling through the bushes.
No penguins were run over on this visit:
And then we too drove inland a mile to camp for the night behind a hill to try and fail to escape the wind.
Fajitas and red wind for dinner in Julia and Konstantin’s spacious Sprinter.
Sunset at 10 pm and darkness around eleven and daylight at 4:30 you can go a long way in daylight around here. And with 65 degree days it’s a pleasant place to be in summer between rain squalls.
I could camp here for days but we have glaciers to see next.
