More Penguins

No one knows quite why but around 2011 about 80 King Penguins showed up on a beach in Useless Bay (Bahia Inutil) in Chilean Patagonia. 

The early explorers might not have found a use for this deep indent in Tierra Del Fuego but the lucky owners of this beach have turned the penguins into a business. 

These are the only known King Penguins in n South America and it seems they do well here as there are now around 140. We paid $15 each to spend an hour checking them out and we weren’t alone, as there’s a tour every hour. The young man in our tour was a Swiss traveler going north. He and our hitchhiker got along great and left together. Our good deed. 

On the subject these penguins mate for a year and try to produce an egg and next year the rebakes look for some other mate. The guide told us about half the eggs produced each year grow to maturity. 

This brown ball of fluff is a juvenile molting its youth fuzz and getting ready to look mature.  

We had them under close observation. 

Mostly they stand around preening and staring intently  into the distance. 

Like this: 

If you don’t tie it down on Tierra Del Fuego sooner or later it will blow away. Learn the lesson:

This headless Kibg Penguin is standing on an egg which it keeps warm while his/her mate is off having lunch. Then they swap. 

When they walk King Penguins which grow up to three feet tall, rock their heads from side to side and balance themselves with their stubby little wings. The mixture of severe straight backed posture and clown like walk is really fun to watch. 

According to our guide this colony is thriving as the penguins have lots of food in the cold waters of Useless Bay, including their favorites of sardine and squid, and their predators, seals and orcas principally don’t come into the shallow waters so life is pretty easy here for the penguins. 

If you are a penguin you stand around and preen or lie around and  snooze. Or stand around and snooze with your head tucked into your armpit. Weird. 

Goodbye penguins. 

Oh and you to disinfect your feet around here. No idea quite why but I live to obey. 

We decided to drive twenty extra miles of gravel to a hot shower in a little village called Camerón, planning to rest for a day or two before crossing to Argentina. 

This detour would require us to double back to cross into Argentina but we were up for some twenty mile an hour exploration. 

The views were splendid and the gravel was recently graded. 

Camerón it turned out was not friendly. 

Tierra Del Fuego, Chile

I’m 67 and all my life I’ve read about the explorations of this wild land. Now at last I am here myself at the bottom of the world. 

It looks like the Highlands of Scotland where my duster lives except the emptiness is vast, hundred of miles. 

We enjoyed driving the Lobeliest Road, Highway 50 in Nevada just last year. However it really isn’t that lonely and compared to this it’s positively suburban. 

Occasional ranch buildings a few flocks of sheep, some horses grazing and guanacos running free and gracefully leaping the endless fences. 

The beautifully smooth cement pavement ran out six short miles from Porvenir and I had known that from looking at Google satellite view. That it did so without warning came as a surprise and we rolled off pavement onto gravel trying to slow down from fifty miles per hour to 15.  

 The gravel wasn’t terrible and we could run it between 15 and 20 miles per hour on the best stretches but it’s noisy and dusty and I don’t enjoy trying to find the best lines through washboard and piles of loose pebbles. I love pavement. 

We stopped for sandwiches for lunch and Rusty as always wanted to be outside so he found his spot. 

An overlander in an iOverlander recommended spot by the side of the road. 

Love those dust clouds and the locals zoom by creating huge ones. 

Why this curve was dangerous I couldn’t say but it had its own sign in the middle of nowhere. 

This is Tierra Del Fuego. Isn’t it amazing we drove here? I can’t believe it myself half the time. 

Up ahead the main road took a sharp right turn where there was a bus stop, bit that we saw any buses, and the black structure is a government provided cyclist refuge. 

Rusty owns Tierra Del Fuego. Or thinks he should. 

These refuges are brilliant. Inside they are just empty plywood rooms on many cases with a lift so traveling bicyclists can get out of the vicious weather when needed. 

They also include an attached pit toilet which can be handy for anyone traveling especially if it’s a van with a porta potty that needs emptying from time to time. 

They are scattered all over Chilean Patagonia but the sad thing is they are not respected by their many users. I’m sure the cyclists don’t dump trash or turn the toilet into something  you would never want to use but the refuges are open to anyone. Rather like these fancy bus stops for the use of farm workers and others in these desolate places, graffiti palaces. 

30 more miles of gravel. Two hours for us probably. 

And then we met the road works for the last stretch. This road is going to be paved one day and not a minute too soon if you ask me.

The cement layer: 

An interested audience:

In the background below an old fashioned bicycle refuge now abandoned and next to it the black one in the new style. Meanwhile the penguins were getting closer. The pavement started here but only if you were driving to Argentina. 

We took a sharp right turn to the penguins and stayed on gravel. Lucky us. 

Did I mention I hate gravel?

We wild camped near the penguin sanctuary and this was our view. Not bad. 

Oh and I forgot to mention we picked up a hitch hiker at the bicycle refuge above. The Swiss traveler is an environmental engineer in Switzerland has six months off to see South America. And penguins. 

Rusty took a wild moment and galloped off over the hills chasing a lone guanaco that he must have thought was a reincarnated deer. He hates deer. He ran like a puppy over the horizon and came back ten minutes later panting like a steam engine. The guanaco played him like a pro and led him into a coma. So much so he never noticed the Patagonian fox that walked through our camp. 

He’s very fierce really when he’s not sleeping. Age takes its toll. 







He is not going to sleep in a tent. He sleeps with me lady.