Penguinos!

This morning at 7am we caught a tour (the only way out) to Isla Magdalena -- an island in the Strait of Magellan with a huge flock of penguins. 62,000 pairs of magellanic penguins live on this little island alone. On an island nearby lives a colony of huge sea lions that think the penguins are the perfect tasty treat. The island itself was barely visible from land -- that's how wide the Strait is at this point.

(this is not the boat we took, but Rebecca couldn't stop taking pictures of it...)

(From this dock we boarded an extra large enclosed zodiac. If you have really good eyes, you can see the island as a small blip at the exact center of the horizon.)

(The early morning ride was beautiful and not very choppy. As the island got closer we could begin to see the historic lighthouse at the top.)

(Rebecca was enjoying the ride out. Not so much on the way back. The tour leaves so early because the Strait gets downright nastly as the morning progresses.)

(Penguins!!!!! We also saw sea lions lurking nearby in the water..)

(Our boat at the dock on Isla Magdalena.)

(Basically our hour on the island was spent snapping as many photos as we possibly could. Penguins look totally adorable no matter what they are doing. Here Elizabeth and Blake are taking videos of penguins crossing the road.)

(It was cold!)

(Baby penguins. We also saw penguins making babies!)

The boat ride back was NOT smooth sailing. But Elizabeth, Marty, me, and our new German friend sat in the very front and rode the roller coaster -- you had to brace yourself against the ceiling and the floor when the huge swells hit! It was the first time in my life that I have not gotten seasick. yay! But poor Rebecca was crouched on the back of the boat for fresh air in her rain gear getting soaked by the ocean spray. She fortunately managed to avoid getting actually seasick. yay!

Short video of Boat Ride and Penguins (2min 38 sec)

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Mountain smackdown (from "Other-Climes")

"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" ... Ha!

Clearly Mark Twain was not very well traveled. Having spent many, many summers in San Francisco, the four of us unanimously agreed that the coldest winter WE ever spent was a summer in Torres del Paine, Patagonia.

We're pilfering some of Elizabeth & Marty's very accurate take (in blue) on our "10 day" trek from their own travel blog (www.other-climes.blogspot.com) in this posting:

We´re back from our ten-day Torres del Paine trek. It lasted, instead, one day.

(Nothing says "welcome" better than a sign in a downpour.)

(Optimism on a bus: Z, Marty, Rebecca)

Short version: The weather was just too horrendous for us. 10 minutes in, and some of us still have some dry garments.

Longer version: We set out in high spirits. Even the dead horse next to the trail didn´t seem like a bad omen. But it rained all day, we all got as soaked as if we were wearing bikinis instead of Goretex, and with the high winds, we each took turns flirting with hypothermia. Just for fun, a few old injuries flared up too. Suddenly 10 flat miles didn´t seem so easy after all.

And -- this was the clincher -- we never saw the mountains. After we got to camp we did get a couple of glimpses of the bases of some of the peaks, but the clouds stayed constant in spite of the equally constant winds.

(2 hours in: hallelujah, a temporary shelter)

Luckily, the camp we reached that evening was a very comfy one, complete with hot cocoa for sale.

(Cozy and warm at the Refugio.)

This fortified us so that we could put up our tents without their sailing into the lake (though Rebecca and Blake´s tent fly made a break for it, actually pulling out most of its stakes!).

(Tents with Paine Grande looming ever cloudily in the background.)

We took off our sodden clothes, and were even able to take showers and cook in an enclosed space (in some weird outfits!). But an easy day it was not. It was pretty demoralizing.

(The cooking dome at Paine Grande campground.)

So we left. We were still at a point where we could take a boat back across the lake and go back -- it was a very welcomed release valve. We got back to Puerto Natales, found a hostel with a puppy, and regrouped.

Now we´re trying to eat our way through 10 days of backpacking food (¨More polenta, Blake?¨ ¨Why, thank you, Rebecca.¨ ¨Perhaps some oatmeal, Marty? Or powdered drink mix?¨) while appreciating being warm and dry.

And we have decided to console ourselves with penguins.

This afternoon we arrived in Punta Arenas, a rather large Chilean city on the Strait of Magellan. Tomorrow morning, quite early, we´ll take a boat out to Isla Magdalena tomorrow to visit a colony of Magellanic penguins! I´m excited.

In a couple of days, we´ll return to Puerto Natales and we may take another crack at the park. Purportedly the weather should be better. We´ll see. It is a place that holds great attraction for all of us. Just think if we were actually able to see this!

(Torres del Paine in all of its glory -- not our photo...)

In the meantime, I´m looking forward to those pinguinos.

For now it's off to see the penguins, then back to the park for round two. This time our plan is to stay in the backcountry for a couple of nights at one campground and do a day hike on the interim day. The weather forecast (though everyone tells us there is no such thing as predictable weather in Torres del Paine) is to be 20 degrees warmer than last week and even a few days possibly without any rain at all.

Despite the foul weather, we did get to see some magical moments:

-- Blake

Patagonia: Puerto Natales

So, on our first day in Santiago a week ago, we made plane reservations on a local airline, Sky Airlines, to fly down to the southern tip of Chile -- but we forgot to ask how many stops the plane makes. Big mistake. Turns out our plane (which was not all that cheap...) made FOUR stops. It felt more like a bus than a plane. Though they did serve 2 actually pretty good meals along the way. We got into Punto Arenas way too late to catch the last 3 hour bus ride to Puerto Natales which is the gateway town to Torres del Paine National Park. We had to make last minute reservations at a hostel that neglected to tell us that they were having a huge rock party with bands playing until well past 3am. Grrrr. We felt old. But, I think it was all a blessing in disguise because we got to take the 3 hour bus ride in the daylight -- and it was beautiful! AND we saw wild flamingos!

(We left the bus station in Punto Arenas at around 10:30am. The couple in front of us leaned their chairs all the way back and made kissy noises most of the way until they finally fell asleep.)

(But then we drove on a highway that ran right alongside the Straight of Magellan. This is a photo out of the bus -- with the "Emergency Exit" letters on the window. )

For those whose grade school history is a little fuzzy, (as mine was), the Straight of Magellan is the route that Magellan discovered to cut off the very southern tip of the continent to save some time going around it. Now we have the Panama Canal instead. This whole region of Chile and parts of Argentina are full of fjords -- often you have to take ferries to get to other parts. Every Chilean in Santiago and Valparaiso who we told where we were headed exclaimed to us how beautiful it is in the south. Pampas, lakes and jagged snowcapped mountains as far as the eye can see.

(Me and my new best friend. She's only 4 months old and has no name yet. She's the Hostel cat at the hostel called "Erratic Rock" that we are staying in -- started by a friend of Elizabeth's. Awesome place to stay! Pretty much everyone staying there is about to head in to trek in the Park or just came back from it. Except for my new best friend. She just chases your shoelaces as you walk around the hostel all day long.)

We met up with Elizabeth and Marty yesterday, went out for drinks at a local brewery, and started to plan our 10 day backcountry trip through what is known as "the circuit" in Torres del Paine. They are halfway through their 1 year odyssey through India, Southeast Asia, and now South America, before they head back to San Francisco.

(Here we are in the final stages of planning our food for 10 days. Uggh. That's around 60 pounds of food! The circut has some refugios in it (like huts) that you can buy food it is *very* expensive and not good, so we're only eating a couple of meals at those.)

(Ahhh. After a grueling day of doing nothing but running around finding food, getting last minute supplies, packing our bags for the next 10 days, we finally got to eat at around 10:30pm.)

Tomorrow head out out on a 7:30am bus that takes 2 or 3 hours to get to the park. Then we ease into things with a fairly easy 5 hour hike. The first 4 days of our trip are along "the W" which is a very popular and heavily travelled trail. Then we head up and around the back of the amazing mountains where things will be a lot quieter.

It's whipping wind outside and it's been raining for part of the day every day. We've got rain gear, multiple pairs of long underwear, and plenty of hot cocoa. Wish us luck!

We plan to arrive back here at the Erratic Rock hostel later in the day on Thursday the 18th. We'll stay here two nights and then plan our next steps up through Argentina. Think sunny and warm thoughts for us!

-- Blake

Photos of Street Art

Here are a bunch of photos from street art we've seen all over the city of Valparaiso. Yesterday we went to "el ex-carcel" and old prison that's been turned into a cutting edge cultural space. The walls were lined with murals.

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First day in Valparaiso

(Our first glimpse of the Andes, shrouded in clouds.)

After a 9 hour flight from Dallas, we arrived in Santiago, paid our tariff, went through customs and were off. We caught a public bus to the center of Santiago – because of a combination of our terrible Spanish and bad directions we ended up having to walk a bunch of blocks with our FIVE (yes five) bags – two ginormous backpacks, two daypacks, and a duffel full of food for the backpacking trip. We both agreed that after the backpacking trip we needed to pare down so that everything fits into our backpacks alone. The bus-ride from Santiago to Valparaiso was super cozy. The scenery on the way looked so much like California it was weird – iceplants lining the freeways, eucalypus trees, yellow grasses. Even the freeway signs were more or less the same colors.

We got to the Valparaiso bus station and a young woman who spoke English remarkably well gave us a map, showed us some interesting spots on it, and even explained exactly how to catch a “collectivo” (taxis that pick up more than one fare at a time) or public bus to our hostel. It was technically a super soft sell for her tour company, but so appreciated. The challenges of speaking Spanish were wearing on us as we got more and more exhausted. Plus, we were discovering that I could understand better than speak and Rebecca could speak better than understand, so our conversations with helpful (and incredible patient) people were a three-way sort of deal where they would say something, Rebecca would look quizzical and I would translate it into English to her, and she would respond back. We quickly practiced how to say “Gracias por su paciencia” -- which is probably grammatically wrong but does the trick.

(Hostel Bellavista -- our room is the upper left one that is open.)

Five plus hours after touching down in Santiago, we finally made it to Hostel Bellavista. A totally picturesque little hostal in a burgeoning artists area of town called Cerro Bellavista. The Hostel itself is covered in murals. The streets all around us and in a neighboring area, Cerro Concepcion, are covered in “graffiti” – basically totally amazing street art.

(Two 3 or 4 month old kittens and a painting of a man playing guitar. Blake has a keen eye for baby animals. There are so many cute dogs and cats everywhere here.)

Really truly some of the most exciting I’ve ever seen – incredibly good art – I couldn’t put my camera down as we were walking the streets.

We took showers and went down to have bite to eat and found this great little café bar where we had really yummy café con leche, sandwiches, local porter, and awkwardly ordered juice. “Cual typo de jugos”…“Duranza” … “Naranja?” …“No.” Okay I’ll take it anyhow. Turned out to be peach juice, also good. Needless to say we decided to sign up for 10 hours of private 2-on-1 Spanish lessons while we are in Valparaiso to give us a little jumpstart on our language adventure. We start on Wednesday.

We took a long wonderful walk after our meal, to an “ascensor” up to the top of Cerro Allegre. Valparaiso is basically a small amount of flat area surrounded by steep tall hills. You can walk up the many long staircases that connect these split neighborhoods together, or you can take an outdoor cabled elevator for 100 pesos apiece (about 20 cents). I looked up while we were riding it – Rebecca looked down and said it was a little scary – they are on a STEEP incline.

At the top was a little area chock full of cute cafes and bars, art galleries very reminiscent of the Telegraph and Grand Galleries – really really cool art. We immediate decided that we will come back here again at the end of our trip – since we have to come back to Santiago anyhow to fly back home.

We both also decided that Valparaiso is about as romantic as it gets. Tomorrow our plan is to take a long walk along the ocean, take another “ascensor” up to another neighborhood nearby, bring Rebecca’s fancy camera with us to take more pictures of amazing street art, charming buildings, and gorgeous views. Neither of us can believe this is only the first day of 4 months!

(View of the ocean from the top of the Cerro Alegre ascensor.)

(Here we are blogging from a perfect cafe with WiFi, that took us a while to find this morning -- but now we are eating cafe con leches, toast and jam, fresh squeezed orange juice, and some awesome eggs with ham.)

-- Blake