After leaving Ushuaia, we went to Punta Arenas, a small city in the Chilean Patagonia, famous for a national reserve where a penguins’ colony lives.

Punta Arenas is a small and quiet city, we just stayed 2 nights but that was enough for us to go visit the penguins’ colony Monumento Nacional Los Pingüinos on Isla Magdalena.

We took a ferry to the island where the penguins live, after 2 hours of boat ride we reached the reserve. We are allowed to stay 1 hour on the island, in order not to disturb the penguins too much.

 

There is a path on the island that we must follow, and penguins live freely on the island. There are a lot of tourists and the guides are a little bit stressed, but this way at least they make sure the tourists don’t disturb the penguins too much!

It’s really funny to see so many penguins! Apparently they live in holes that they dig themselves! There were a lot of young penguins as well, we could distinguish them by the fur they have 🙂

 

And it’s great, even though you have to stay on the path, you get to see the penguins quite close, like 1-2 meters away!

After the visit on the island, we took the ferry back to Punta Arenas, and on the next day took a bus to Puerto Natales to prepare for our trek in the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine.

We stayed in Puerto Natales 3 days, on the first day we were lucky with the weather and decided to go for a walk on a small mountain close to the city. From there we had a great view on the city and the fjord! Also we were close to a cliff, that was quite impressive! The view from there was really amazing!

The next 2 days we stayed relaxed in the city, the weather was not great, quite a lot of rain and we didn’t want to get too tired before starting the trek in Torres del Paine. So we walked around the city and started preparing the equipment for the trek!

After 3 days in Puerto Natales, we left for the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine to do the “W” trek in 5 days, I’ll write about this in the next article!