South America Sabbatical

Leaving the mountains of Patagonia, we travel south from Puerto Natales to Punta Arenas, a small city at the southern extreme of the South American continent. Located on the Straits of Magellan, it has a fascinating history as a maritime and commercial center. It was a very prosperous port during the Victorian era and up until the Panama Canal allowed ships to bypass this end of South America. The City has beautiful old buildings of the 19th century when the powerful Braun and Menéndez families competed to dominate the business world here.

The city is laid out with broad tree-lined boulevards that anticipated a city that never really grew after the canal was opened. The cemetery shows the opulent lifestyle of the founding families and is just an amazing landscape to see. Later in its history, Punta Arenas was the center of planning for the expeditions of Shakleton and Scott. A fascinating (but windy -- trees grow at about 10 degrees from vertical) city to visit.

Since we are so close to the antarctic, we can take a bus out to the penguin colony at Seno Otway to see a small colony of Magellanic Penguins. Another very windy walk, but there are about 30,000 penguins nesting in burrows along the coast here. We aren´t able to see quite this many, but we watch them coming in from feeding in the ocean and gathering in large groups at both the beach and at their burrows.

From Punta Arenas we continue our visit to the Pacific side of Patagonia, flying into Puerto Montt. This is a larger and more contemporary city as it was largely destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 1960. Just to the south of the city is the island of Chiloe where residents live a more relaxed lifestyle of gathering shellfish and seaweed. The coast has abundant wildlife and unspoiled coastline.

Compared to other parts of Patagonia, we are delighted to discover (and of course eat) a much larger variety of seafood.