Guatemala and we’ll see what comes next.
Breathtakingly gorgeous Patagonia, cruising through the Chilean fjords, Santiago, Wow-Cusco, Machu Picchu(!), and the Amazon Rain Forest.
Crystal Symphony. And all that pollution is from shore – an uncontrolled fire of burning wood chips I heard. (Note: if 1/1000 of this smoke was coming out of the ship’s stack we would be Toast with the authorities.)
So now goodby to Wilson and Ramon, with hugs and kisses and grateful thanks and fondest memories.
You can go directly to: Patagonia, the Chilean Fjords, Cusco and Machu Picchu, and the Amazon Rain Forest.
Another tourista stop. Even Ramon couldn’t tell about the place with much of a straight face.
The star marks the spot where you stand and where you stand marks the exact middle distance between the northern most end of Chile and the southern most end of Antarctica.
So there. I don’t remember about the Mary…
Bad tourist! I have pictures of two different waterfalls. I can clearly remember the difference, how it was getting there, what we talked about etc. etc. etc. but I can’t remember the names!
So we had a Pisco Sour and lunch and coffee. ALL coffee in Every restaurant was this coffee.
The Magellan penguins are smaller and as you can see differently colored than the Antarctic penguins. Maybe because there were so few of them around it felt like you could know them up-close-and-personal.
The penguins nest in burrows scattered around areas that look like this.
I visited with these folks on the plane and then we ran into each other in town and had a nice chat and then, when we ran into each other here too we just had to have a foto.
The baby guanaco are called hulengo and this one, according to Ramon, is not more than three days old. Just minutes before he had been gamboling around the pasture and then plop, he decides to take a break and mom comes ’round to check. Kisses…
Then we went to Ramon’s house to look for the sea lions that they had spotted in the bay.
Big dogs!
Ramon.
For one hour it was cold and blustery and I did wear my hat and scarf. That was it for cold. The stroll to the penguin colony was cool, so I could use the hat again but not the scarf. And not the two wool sweaters or the extra pair of leggings or the gloves. And when I think of the weight I could have saved in my suitcase! But then for that one hour I was mighty glad to have it.
Penguins and sea gulls. Not really the shoulder to shoulder penguin colonies of Antarctica but still, Penguins!
The view from my window at our hotel, Hosteria Pehoe, on the shores of Lake Pehoe.
This is a made-for-the-tourists restored fort. Ramon said they’d rebuilt it a few times already. Here we see an example of the adobe construction that grew up around the Europeans, not a native technique but cheap and useful.
The Spanish first came here in 1584 but they all starved to death. Then in 1843 the Chileans sent a schooner manned by the islander Chilotes and an English officer to occupy the area and they were pretty much driven out by the elements too. And as was so often the case everywhere, the few indigenous people all died of European diseases.
His head is deep in the grass diving for seeds or bugs, and his beak is needle thin and as long as his body.
As for my two days there, all the locals in the park and in town and those who saw these pictures – all of them – said that in any entire year there are not even five days as clear and bright and warm and free of wind as my time in the park and adding all the irresistibly adorable baby animals we saw, amazingAmazingAMAZING was the universal exclamation.
The moon at sunrise.
I spent a couple of days re-doing one of the Peru sections from my last trip. Here’s a direct link to the new stuff.
Better?
