Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Penguins

Punta Arenas, Chile

December 22, 2017

We got off the ship and started our penguin tour! The tour that we booked was through Holland America Line. We went to our bus and we were the last bus to leave. Our tour guides name was Marcela and she had woken up at 4am to come to Punta Arenas. Since bus number 25 (the bus we were on) was supposed, to be part of a different tour we got to go first even though we were last. Marcela told us to get our lunch packs which came in cute penguin backpacks. Then we got on the ferry to see the penguins! My Mom and I played chopsticks and my Dad took a nap. When my Dad wasn’t sleeping he was eating the sandwich that they gave us and so was I. After 2 hours in the ferry we got off and put on our jackets and went out into the very brisk weather. There were 200,000 penguins including baby penguins. We were lucky to go on a feeding day (The baby penguins only get fed every 2-3 day) and my Dad got an awesome video of a Dad penguin giving seaweed to his babies. Interesting fact penguins produce 2 baby penguins every year and produce with the same mate every year like husband and wife. Penguins make burrows in the dirt where they sleep and keep their babies safe. I got a great picture of the lighthouse, a penguin and a seagull flying over the lighthouse.  My favorite thing about penguins was how they walk. If you have watched Mary Poppins you would have seen Burt walk like a penguin with the penguin waiters. If you haven’t seen Mary Poppins you should see it. When we first walked out there were 3 penguins just laying out in the sun looking very smug. A lot of the babies were poking their heads out and I got a picture of a baby penguin looking straight at me! Apparently, the weather was rougher than usual the day before we arrived, and some baby penguins died. We saw a dead baby penguin. It’s Mom or Dad was sitting next to it and it was really sad. We were only there for an hour. When I first heard that, I was like, “that’s not a lot of time”, considering how long the commute was, but after 50 minutes I was ready to go back into the nice warm ferry. We started our journey back to the ship. I looked at my pictures on the way back and I took 253 pictures and videos of penguins. The boat was really rocking and, so I took a 15, minute nap and I felt much better. The ships’ all aboard was 5:30pm. We didn’t arrive back until 6:30pm, so we were really glad that we had taken a tour with Holland. We would have been freaking out that we were going to be left behind if we had booked independently. We got back on the ship just in time for evening trivia. 15 minutes after we got on the ship pulled away from the dock. I hope to see more penguins in the near future!



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