Jannis & Martine

Here a quick post since we are on a pretty tight schedule right now…

We have left Buenos Aires last week, but not before we had visisted some nice museums, the Sunday market at San Telmo again and I had gotten an Argentinan haircut. As we now had a full day to explore the Sunday market we watched lots of performances, of which a very good tango music performance by music students was the highlight.

The last day we had some very late dinner (not a problem here, since you can easily go out for dinner at 12 o´clock at night) and slept some hours at the airport (to save an overnight stay in a hotel)  to checkin for our flight to Santiago de Chili at 5 o´clock.

After we had arrived in Santiago we changed planes for our flight to Punta Arenas in the south. This flight was really beautifull since it was very clear weather and the full 3 hour flight was over the Andes mountains, so we did see lots of mountains, rivers, lakes, snow and even a couple of glaciers.

Until yesterday we have stayed in Punta Arenas which is an Chilean outpost in the southern part of Patagonia, which used to be a pretty busy city. This was before the Panama canal existed, and all ships had to sail around Cape Horn.

Nowedays it is still a pretty big city for this area with a port, a large airfield (even with ex-Dutch F16´s on it), lots of tourists to see the penguins, trees that are bended by the strong winds and colourfull wind-battered houses which are all protected by steel plating on their walls. This all results in a Scottisch looking city with the same weather and with bright coulored Scandinavian looking houses.

We did not do much here, expet for making plans for the next couple of weeks. But, we did have some very nice Chilean/Brazilian stewish soups (in a very tiny sailor type of cafe run by some Brazilian looking women), visit a very impressive museum and we did do the famous Penguin trip.

This trip really was a highlight, as we went by boat to the remote Isla Magdelane island at which about 100.000 penguins are breeding. Since you could walk in between the penguins and they were not shy at all, this was really a great experience, seeing penguins wiggling around everywhere.

You can get an impression of this by checking out our Flickr-webpage as we now are uploading our pictures from our last two weeks of travelling around Uruquay, doing the nice ferry ride across the Rio de la Plate to Tigre near Buenos Aires, flying into Chili over the Andes to Punta Arenas and seeing the penguins.

We now are in Argentina again as we have left Punta Arenas two days ago for a 12-hour bus ride to Ushaia in the Argentinian part of Tierre del Feugo (land of fires / vuurland), so we really now are at the ´end of the world´….

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.