Patagonia
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Wild Penguins: The Last Patagonia Chronicle, Part 5
Exploiting nature for money is a thing of the past. Yeah not really; but it should be. All across the globe humans are furrowing their brows, concerned about the sustainability of and our effects on wildlife. Muscles were tingling, cinching up somewhere inside as I was surrounded by the “typicals” swiping from photo to photo on their phones at the harbor in Ushuaia. We had just gone from hut to hut elbowing past swaths of people lining up beside business signs on the walkway. The signs had crouching humans taking selfies with Magellanic Penguins. “Visit Penguin Island!” they said. This was where crouching people turned into an encroaching species. I…
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The Patagonia Chronicles Part 2: Is That Really Another Guanaco?
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The Patagonia Chronicles Part 3: A Flamingo, An Ice Wall, A Rock Pile, & An Estancia
Crossing between Chile and Argentina was little more than a blink of an administrative counter. We got out to lift up a chain and let ourselves over. We had been strategically planning our diesel stops on the map. All plans to purchase and keep a spare can had run dry. The scrub grass silence was broken when we took a 65 km shortcut down a cheese grater and laughed in disbelief that the lambs had long tails. They wagged like dogs. Then there was the lone flamingo. Lost far from it’s comrades in Northern Chile, the wind had grounded it. It was the only colorful thing for hundreds of miles,…
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Tierra Del Fuego, The End of the World: The Patagonia Chronicles Part 4
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The Patagonia Chronicles Part 2: Is That Really Another Guanaco?
Puerto Natales is the closest hub of civilization and it’s 80 km to the national park. From our hostel we passed the town’s pride, a massive Milodon sculpture, and later on the cave of the Milodon. I wasn’t even really sure what a Milodon was, but knew it was big, kinda had the body of a bear and the face of a llama, and it was really old. Yeah, like 5,000 years old. But the landscape looked exactly like a place where dinosaurs, Milodons, and cave men probably ran around. There’s just something that doesn’t couple about sliding around in a ragged out truck rocking out to Nelly’s “Ride Wit…
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Wild Penguins: The Last Patagonia Chronicle, Part 5
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The Patagonia Chronicles Part 1: Backpacks, Bagualeros, and Torres
The dreaded blue box . . . A plane full of backpackers chatters as we barrel in our silver bullet from Santiago to Punta Arenas. Many were headed to Antarctica. My blood pressure begins to calm since the teenager in the airport aggressively demanded to assess the size of my (and everyone else’s) backpack at the plane door by trying to put a blue box over it. Shoutout to LATAM airlines, the biggest bunch of bag-Nazi-fun-police I’ve seen in 43 countries. You people need a physics lesson that a bag exactly the size of the allowed dimensions will not fit into a blue cardboard box the exact same size. “You’re…
