Peninsula Brunswick
Trip Start
Mar 01, 2006
1
289
551
Trip End
Dec 01, 2007
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Punta Arenas,
Chile
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
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Alarm clock at 7, for a departure at 7.45. We had organized the day before for the car and the food, and for the 5th passenger: Leslie, and American girl met in our first guesthouse.
We already had the car, we needed to make a stop at the bakery to get bread for the picnic, and we were to pick up Lesley. She was a teacher from Colorado, and on her way, tranquilo, to Ushuaia, where she was going to teach english for a semester. It did not go smoothly, as Bruno parked where we shouldn't have before trying to get a breakfast from the bakery, and the bread was not ready, so I went with Milva to get Lesley first and then came back to pick up Bruno and Lionel who were freezing waiting for us at the corner.
First destination: to the south of the peninsula, to Fort Bulnes. The first part was a sealed road, and then soon we were driving on ripio, or unsealed road, but much better than the argentinian gravel roads.
The morning light was glorious, as we were driving with the strait of magellan on our left, and the peninsula, that last bit of the americas, on our right.
At some point I spotted something in the water: dolphins!!! They were some 20 meters from the shore, after the curtain of seaweed, going the same way as us. We got off the car to watch them, coming out to breathe and sometimes speeding and splashing water as they went through it. They were behaving much like common dolphins (bottlenose), that Lionel knew very well, but they looked smaller. Back in the car, driving slowly to go at the same speed as them and keep watching them, we were really wondering what kind of dolphins they were, so they decided to give us the answer: on an acceleration where they were all playing, one of them jumped out of the water and rotated in the air just to let us see its white belly, contrasting with its black back: they were Tonina dolphins, the smallest specie of dolphins, the ones we were supposed to meet in Puerto Deseado. There were maybe 6 of them, they were small, and looked like orcas.
We drove ahead and stopped again, and waited for them on the rocks on the shore. We watched them pass once more, at times moving slowly, at others speeding in endless games of theirs.
Then we made it to the fort: Fuerte Bulnes. An attempted settlement that did not last, but which was the move by Chile to claim the strait of magellan as theirs. Nearby was Puerto Hambre, where another early settlement of pioneers had starved to death (hambre meaning hunger)
The fort had been reconstructed, in local wood and turba bricks, with even a church. When we got in there was one ray of light, that was illuminating the heart of Jesus. But I don't care for such things, and I just enjoyed and welcomed the coincidence.
We walked to Punta Santa Anna, from where each of us stayed for a while on its own spot. The place was really inspiring, a turn in the strait of magellan, a point where old floating trees would end their journey, a place for cormorans and ducks to stop by or feed, a piece of land where we could sit and watch the fishing boat going from a small point on the far right t to being very close and to dissapearing again on the far left.
We them visited the natural reserve of Laguna Parillar, where we had our picnic and then a forest walk. We saw a zorro too (fox).
As Lesley had not seen pinguins yet, and to save her the expensive tours in Ushuaia, and because we were happy to see pinguins again, we went to a pinguinera, where it was magic again, to just watch the pinguins do their business, fight a bit, show off, get clumsily out of the water, hide in their burrows or in the shrubs. The evening light was offering nice colors of the mountains and fields and small lakes, spotted with cattle and pink flamingoes.
In the evening we bought 1.5kg of meat for 4 and ate it all, hehe.
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