Day 23 1st February 2011

Penguin Ruckery Beagle Channel

Glacier Beagle Channel

Johnny Kingdom

We awoke in Ushuaia which is the southern most city in the world. It is surrounded by snow capped mountains. The scenery was spectacular with the Beagle channel on one side and the mountains on the other. We had booked to go on a six hour boat trip up the Beagle channel to see the wildlife and this was an excellent decision. Initially, we went to two small islands to see king and emperor cormorants and sea lions. The boat got us to within a few feet of both. There were huge numbers of birds standing in rows and covering most of the rocky island. On the sea lion island the bulls are simply enormous and have harems of ten to twenty females. There was a long gap between the second and third stop since we went some distance up the channel to the penguin rockery. These were Magellanic penguins and the rockery was enormous with several thousands animals. Again, we got within a few feet of them. They were coming in and out of the water. They seemed completely at ease with us and walked up to the boat and swam around it.

The other interesting part of the journey was that we sat on the boat with Johnny Kingdom, the wildlife photographer and television presenter and his wife. He is on the trip because he is giving three talks on his work during the voyage. He was trying to film and photograph as much wildlife during the trip as he could. His wife was a lovely friendly lady. Johnny is a larger than life person who showed us many of his photographs including a King Penguin with its egg shot on the Falklands and an albatross in flight near Cape Horn. There were simply hundreds of albatrosses near Cape Horn. These are not the wandering albatross that flies thousands of miles but a smaller species that only has a wing span of 2.7 metres.

The stop at Ushuaia was only for seven hours and we left at 3pm to sail down the beagle channel past a series of glaciers. These were simply amazing with some coming all the way down to the water which was frozen. You need to remember that it is summer here. We were lucky enough to have all the glaciers on the starboard side of the ship where we have our room and balcony. As we went along the scenery became even more stunning with higher mountains and larger snow fields. The channel forms the border between Chile and Argentina with one shore being Chile and the other Argentina. It is named after HMS Beagle, the ship that took Darwin on his voyages. Darwin spent a lot of time in this area.

Tomorrow is Punta Arenas which is in Chile. It is another port were the ship is too large to dock so we get tendered into the quay.