In Patagonia

Now in Punta Arenas, The flight in was amazing - you fly over the Andes for more than 3 hours. When we took off, we saw the dusty brown mountains surrounding Santiago and a dense layer of smog above the city (you don't feel it when you're down there!). Then it was just range after range of snow-capped mountains, glaciers, brilliant blue lakes, ice fields - and not a town in sight. Then, almost abruptly, the Andes end and you see the road down below snaking through a strange watercolour of green, ochre and brown alongside a deep blue ocean. It really seems like the end of the world out here; the plane went out to sea and looped in - and you could feel the tension inside (the rosaries were out). After all, its next stop Antarctica after this!

Punta Arenas has a frontier town feel to it. Corrugated roofs - surprisingly brightly coloured - and little weather beaten houses on their own quarter-acres. The town is laid out in a grid and has a plaza in the centre with a statue of Magellan. Walked down to the ocean front and saw the straits of Magellan. It was a wet and windy day (typical Patagonia) and the sea was steel-grey. It felt strange actually being here and seeing something one had only read about in geography books!

Met Sarah, a doctor from Manchester, at the hostal...She was also on the flight in – and was equipped with a huge Spanish-English dictionary that she kept referring to while underlining passages from El Mercurio (Chile’s leading newspaper). We went out for dinner and her Spanish came in handy – in ordering a veggie dish!

We went the next day to Magdalena Island to see a penguin colony; decided to take a collectivo to the ferry wharf. Collectivos are common across Chile and are essentially share-a-cabs that are numbered and have boards showing their destinations. Number 20 usually drops you off some distance from the port but our friendly driver in his dilapidated Lada (a first for me – riding in a Lada!) put an ‘Out of Order’ sign instead of the usual board and dropped us right in front. He seemed Croatian – there seem to be a lot of Croatians in PA. Later discover Punta Arena’s sister city is Split in Croatia…

It’s a 2 hour ride on the Melinka, a rusty red landing craft, through the Straits of Magellan to Magdalena Island. It was a moody afternoon and a biting wind whipped up froth off a heaving sea. Most passengers hurriedly retreated to the main cabin after braving the wind on deck for a few minutes. Melinka’s safeguard against the notorious Straits is a little shrine to the Virgin del Carmen, patron saint of Chile.

Magdalena Island is a rocky outcrop that is home to 20,000 penguins and a lighthouse. If I had come a few weeks earlier, that number would have been 120,000 (penguins, not lighthouses). These are Magellanic or jackass penguins (the unfortunate name comes from the sound they make)…They spend 6 months of the year here, mainly for breeding – and then (sensibly) avoid the Patagonian winter – heading up north to the warmer shores of Brazil and Uruguay by March.

By the time we went there, the chicks had already left (early March is too cold for them) – but the adults and juveniles were still there, moulting in preparation for the sea journey. Interesting seeing them in various stages of shedding their feathers! Jackass penguins are monogamous - and are usually seen in pairs. It was a fantastic experience walking around the island with thousands of penguins literally at arm’s length. Oh, and I forgot to mention the sea lions, skuas, arctic terns, cormorants and of course, sea gulls that we saw.

On our return, after seeing a glorious sunset over the Straits, we hung around in the freezing cold waiting for a collectivo while the rest of the passengers got into their pre-booked vans and cars. The curse of the collectivo was on us – obviously the official pick-up point was half a km away and we had no other means of transport! A middle-aged Chileno couple joined us (they were looking for one as well!) and we got talking. After a few minutes, just when it looked like we’d have to trek up the road, a man walked down the boarding ramp. Our friend got talking with him on where to get transport – turned out he was the Melinka’s captain! The upshot of all this – we all piled into his car and he dropped us downtown. He even suggested the name of a good Italian restaurant.

We had a pleasant dinner with Francesco and Ximena. They lived in Vina del Mar and were on a week long holiday to the South. Francesco seemed to be a bigshot in the shipping industry and ran a logistics company out of Valparaiso. His impression of Indians? Excellent engineers who knew all about steel – he’d met a few in the 1970s when he was at Santos in Brazil. Interesting to see different takes on Indians as I went along – Sarah’s best friend back home was Bindu; born in Manchester but she had the usual collection of Ganeshas at home.

Photo album for this post available at: http://picasaweb.google.com/shivmoulee/Patagonia