Penguins! (And Punta Arenas)

Maybe Katherine should be writing this, because I'll probably embarass myself getting all soppy about penguins...

The most exciting thing today around Punta Arenas is visiting Seno Otway, which is the breeding grounds for about 11,000 penguins every year. "Tours", such as they are, are cheap and cheerful. We paid $5,000 each to get there, and $2,500 to get in (7 pounds total). Once at Seno Otway, you follow a 1km wooden boardwalk that takes you right through the middle of the fields in which the penguins build their nests. For whatever reason, penguins don't really care about humans, and so they're completely fearless, and you can get really close (2m or so) to them. The path parallels the route the penguins use to get from the sea to their nests, so we had fun betting on which penguin would get home first (I won 2.5-0.5). The path they take is always the same - it varies from penguin to penguin, but each individual always goes the same way. Their routes are often convoluted, and involve some tricky jumps - penguins jumping is just about the coolest thing I've ever seen! So anyway, penguins are really cute, and we took far too many photos. They had their babies a month or so ago, so they were almost fully grown, shedding their brown fluff and getting proper feathers.

These are Magallenes penguins, by the way - they're quite small, as far as penguins go, and are all black-and-white with a black stripe running across the top of their chests. They mate for life ("divorce rate" is 10%), and always return to the place they were born to breed themselves. In March they all leave for warmer climes - Brazil and the Falkland Islands, and come back in November.

To remind us of our happy times in the pingüineras (I guess the English equivalent is "penguinery") at Seno Otway I bought Katherine a fluffy Magallenes penguin in the market at Punta Arenas :). Cute!

Back in Punta Arenas, as well as visting the small, touristy market on Sunday morning, we popped into the palace of Josefina Menendez and her husband Mauricio Braun. Punta Arenas used to be very important for sheep cultivation, as well as having a strategic location on the Strait of Magellan. After the Panama Canal ("a man, a plan, a canal, Panama", remember...) the area declined in importance, and there's not much left now. Still, the old palaces of the shipping barons are in good nick, and this one in particular was well-restored to its turn-of-the-century splendour.

All this money in Punta Arenas attracted a lot of foreigners, especially Brits, Swiss, Czechs and Germans. Consequently the city's cemetery is a tourist attraction in itself. The important Braun and Menendez families have huge, opulent mausoleums, and the "regular" graves are often for people with English or Eastern European names. It's very well kept, and was an interesting morning out!

We went up to the Mirador to look down over Punta Arenas, and spotted a cruise ship docked in the port - hence all the annoying American tourists waddling around :). I enjoyed my first proper sight of the Strait of Magellan, once the world's most important sea lane, now practically empty.

Postscript: the Menendez shipping empire survives to this day - it's now called Navimag. Cool, no?