A Chilean Adventure

I don’t know if it was the flip chair or the hot shower, but I don’t even feel sore yet! Maybe it was the cake last night! Anyway, we headed back to the hostel for a good American breakfast that only cost $2 and included eggs, cereal and milk, yogurt, and three kinds of bread. It was great! Then, we finally went shopping to really stock up on fruit and other foods and got back on the road to head to Punta Arenas.

On the way there, we stopped to see the Otway penguin colony, located on the Otway Sound. The guidebook says there are 6,000 breeding pairs in this colony and there’s another one nearby that has 50,000, but there are some even larger along the Argentine coast. I think 6,000 pairs is pretty impressive.

It was REALLY windy, so it made walking around kind of uncomfortable. I think it was uncomfortable for the penguins too, because when we finally saw some they were huddled together and didn’t really do much. We definitely didn’t see 6,000 pairs, but it was still pretty neat and it filled my urge to see penguins in Chile. Have you ever visited the penguin area at the zoo and noticed the disgusting smell? Well, they smelled just as bad in the wild, even though it was a larger are and it was really windy.

We got to Punta Arenas, reserved a room in a hostel, and then went to check out the town. Punta Arenas is located directly on the Strait of Magellan and was a pretty big European colony. Now, the city has about 120,000 people, even though it’s really far south and is pretty isolated from everything.

We walked around the plaza a bit and then went and got some ice cream. We’re starting to call this the “ice cream in every city” tour. We walked up to the big look-out point where you can see the strait, Tierra del Fuego, and supposedly the southern-most part of the contiguous South America.

We still haven’t had any Chilean seafood and Punta Arenas seems like a good place to try it. We went to a little bar that the guidebook recommended and ordered a plate that had many different kinds of seafood: shrimp, squid, clam, oysters, salmon etc. We also tried some of our first Kuntsman beer, which is manufactured in Valdivia. It was all delicious! Perhaps the most pleasing meal in Chile thus far. I have a feeling that we’ll be having a lot more of the Knutsman beer in Valdivia!