Penguinos

3-6
Had a relaxing morning of booking a bus ticket, booking my next hostel, and doing a bit of shopping, the post office, and organizing my bag that I got last night.

In the afternoon, I took a tour to Haberton Estancia (Haberton Ranch...Patagonia is famous for its ranches) which included a zodiac ride (the boat was named Skua..haha!) to an island full of penguins. The island has 6000 adult Magellan Penguins who have burrows in a rookery and also a bunch of Gentoo penguins. The bus ride out there (50ish km from Ushuaia) was of course gorgeous. The penguin island was really cool though b-c we got to walk on a 1km trail through all of the penguins. The penguins here are even less afraid of people than in Antarctica. It was neat to see them in their burrows and to see the couples (megellans breed for life) huddling up together in a penguin cuddle. It was fun to watch them jumping in and out of the water (with a mountain backdrop) and to see them jumping and diving through the water as they swam. You could get really really close, but the coolest part was just seeing a beach completely covered in penguins. Penguins are such funny little guys to watch.
At the ranch we toured a marine life museum which was actualy very informative and had lots of whale and seal skeletons. On the way back we stopped at the famous flag trees...trees with branches on only one side due to the high winds. To me, it actually hasn´t been that windy. They always say how windy Patagonia is and maybe I have been lucky. We have had some wind, but then again, maybe people from Patagonia haven´t been to Estes,.. we also definitely have flag trees, or just trees without branches period. But anyways, these trees were pretty cool bc they were much taller than our alpine trees and they did look like big waving flags.

Tomorrow I have a 15 hour bus ride to Punta Arenas, Chile, which is home to the USAP research vessel Palmer. I´ve been thinking about stowing away on it until next year! The ride will be beautiful I am sure and includes some ferry crossings to get off the island of Tierra Del Fuego.