The captain cuts the engine and the catamaran drifts closer to shore. I’m aboard a shallow-draft passenger ferry — with an onboard bar, no less — approaching Martillo Island in the Argentine half of the Beagle Channel. It’s home to a colony of Magellanic penguins. Magellanics stand about a metre tall and are distinguished by two black bands of feathers between their head and chest. They are the most common penguin species in this part of Patagonia.
The vessel is now mere metres from the shoreline, allowing us to get up close and personal. The penguins couldn’t care less. They’re unafraid and unperturbed
Leopard seals and giant petrels are their natural enemies — we’re not — and the Magellanics waddle across the beach without a care in the world.
This is Patagonia: home of the Andes, the pampas, and the gaucho — the Patagonian cowboy. The region is rich in history. Explorers, adventurers, and scoundrels have all passed through these parts at one time or another and are immortalized in Bruce Chatwin’s epic memoir In Patagonia, a journey he took by bus and on foot in 1977. If I were fifty years younger, I would have done the same thing — but I’ve opted for a guided tour starting in Chile, sweeping around Cape Horn, and ending up in Buenos Aires. I’m looking for penguins, not scoundrels.
Chile and Argentina meet at Tierra del Fuego, at the bottom of the continent. Punta Arenas is in Chile; Ushuaia is in Argentina. Both consider themselves the world’s southernmost settlement — depending, of course, on whom you talk to. Punta Arenas, a pleasant and unpretentious community, is steeped in explorer history and is home to several full-sized replicas: Magellan’s Nao Victoria, which circumnavigated the globe in 1520; Darwin’s HMS Beagle; and the James Caird, the rowboat Ernest Shackleton and his five crewmates sailed to safety after Antarctic ice crushed their ship HMS Endurance in 1915.
For the record, Ushuaia wins the southernmost title by a smidge, and it’s the port I use to continue my nautical journey to the bottom of the world.
I’m chasing two other penguin species: the Chinstrap and the Gentoo. They also reside in Patagonian waters but have migrated south to Antarctica to mate, driven by an instinctive — if not fully understood — loyalty to their favourite rookery.
First, we must cross the Drake Passage, arguably the most dangerous body of water in the world. The clash of Pacific and Atlantic currents can whip the sea into waves eight metres high. I’m glad I’m aboard a modern vessel and not the Nao Victoria of 500 years ago. I survive the crossing — others get seasick.
And then, as suddenly as it began, the wind dies down and beautifully shaped icebergs drift by. We have crossed the Drake. There’s activity at the stern.
Something is chasing the boat — too big for fish but too small for dolphins.
“They’re penguins,” says Natalia, our onboard biologist. Thankfully, there are naturalists aboard to put things in perspective.
As we enter the Antarctic Peninsula, I spot a colony of Chinstrap penguins — so called because of a line of black fur extending from their chins to their ears — atop a scrubby, rocky hill on Half Moon Island. The hill looks inaccessible to me.
Penguins waddle. They don’t climb, do they?
“Oh yes they do,” says Natalia. Or to be more precise, “they hop, using their long, sharp claws for added purchase.”
Natalia fills in the blanks. She tells us interlocking feathers and blubber deposits on their feet and flippers keep penguins warm in harsher climes. In addition, a gland near the tail excretes an oily substance that keeps their coats waterproof.
“If you see a penguin preening, that’s what it’s doing,” she says, “spreading that oil over its body with its flippers.”
Penguins ingest a lot of salt living and feeding in the ocean, and their kidneys alone can’t cope. Again, nature has provided the appropriate tool: a gland in the skull just above the eye filters out excess salt and excretes it as a discharge. Who knew?
As we sail deeper into the peninsula, scrubby hills turn into snowy mountains with glaciers spilling into the sea. We turn north to the Falkland Islands.
Despite the isolation — or maybe because of it — the hardy inhabitants of this windswept outcropping have carved out a slice of Blighty for themselves. The Falkland-Malvinas (its official designation) is home to sheep, English pubs (lots of them), and a Gentoo rookery close to the sea.
Gentoo penguins have orange beaks and legs, and a white band over their heads — and it’s here that I learn about penguin family life.
Gentoo males arrive first to build a nest, using their feet to shovel stones and rocks into a circle. Some other species dig a trough. Female penguins arrive separately, mate, and lay one or two eggs. Both parents take turns incubating the eggs for about a month, and when they hatch, Mom and Dad alternate returning to the sea to bring back food for their offspring.
Penguin child-rearing is very human-like. In fact, I’ve heard penguins are monogamous, attached to their partner for life.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” says Natalia. “A penguin’s goal in life is to have dependents. If I have a partner,” she says, as if she were a Gentoo herself, “and we don’t do well — we can’t raise even one chick — why would I stay with that partner? I’m going to get a new partner next year.”
She quotes studies showing that after three years with the same partner, the penguin “divorce rate” is about 50 per cent.
Penguins, she says, want results. If they’re unhappy with their mate, they move on.
Yep, just like humans, I think to myself.
Antarctica was magical — peaceful and serene — eliciting a reverence for the location and the wildlife. We sailed slowly through the peninsula to reduce engine noise and vibration. International law required it. On deck, everyone spoke in hushed tones.
Disembarking in Buenos Aires was an aural and visual culture shock.
What can I say about Buenos Aires, a city of three million teeming with energy, life, and the dance of the tango? Yes, I attended the obligatory tourist tango show — and I was blown away. Dramatic and flamboyant.
That also describes the streetscape: modern steel-and-glass towers interspersed with ornate 19th-century façades, lots of parks and green spaces, and unique attractions found only in B.A. — like La Recoleta, a sea of statuary and mausoleums that includes the burial tomb of Eva Perón. People are still placing flowers at her gravesite 70 years after her death.
Argentinian politics are complex — but that’s another story.
Buenos Aires was eye-opening. So was my penguin pursuit, because it dispelled some myths. Sure, penguins look ungainly — even cute — but they’re surprisingly swift and adept at getting around. Photographs don’t do them justice. I had to see them for myself, in their natural habitat. I’m sure the ever-curious Bruce Chatwin would have approved.
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