Penguins at last!

Another fantastic day yesterday. After a really windy night when the house was shaking, creaking and I began to wonder whether there would be anything left of it by morning - of course there was - we were collected by our guides, Santiago and Augustin, funny guys with a good line in back chat, and headed east towards Harberton Estancia, which Thomas Bridges, the first missionary, established. It is still owned by the family - the government gifted it to them, under an agreement which means that they cannot sell it, and they run it as a very large nature reserve. They lost all their cattle and sheep some years ago when there was an extremely cold winter, and the cattle starved and the sheep were buried in the snow. So now they preserve the habitat as much as possible and make it possible for the likes of the Brother and me to visit. Beavers were introduced to Tierra del Fuego for their hides in the last century, but this was a disaster for two reasons: firstly, because the fur is only valuable when the beaver feeds on conifers, and there are none here, and secondly, because the indigenous nothophagus trees will not tolerate a very wet soil, and many of them have drowned behind beaver dams. On the islands which dot the Beagle Channel, there is little that can be done to control them, although there is apparently a programme to restrict their numbers on the main island, although little in evidence of this at the moment. The weather was still very windy, so we hiked to a sheltered bay and hopped on an inflatable with outboard to an Argentine naval island, where we had a picnic lunch under the flagpole, on the leeward side of the island, overlooking the Channel, and in full sun. My vegetarian packed lunch consisted of four vegetable pasties or empañadas, a Baggie of cheese cubes, two delicious cakes, and a lovely bag of sliced chorizo. Brother received the latter with glee. Then a trek through the wilderness of the interior, past gun emplacements for the Argentine/Chilean face-off in 1978, a large beaver dam, glorious peat bogs with glowing reds and lime greens, and the ever-present nothophagus (3 kinds; the tall deciduous, the small deciduous and the evergreen - all known as southern beech). The inflatable picked us up again and took us to the penguin colony, where we floated gently at the edge, and enjoyed the fishy whiff of penguin ordure, but mostly just gazed at baby Magellan penguins. One of my life's ambitions finally achieved. They are so sweet and comical, and were really curious about this odd rubber thing which visits them every day and clicks a lot. They kept coming up to peer and pose perfectly, and seemed to enjoy diving and swimming around the boat. Lots of lovely pics of baby and adult birds were duly taken. I don't know if the inflatable was enough for the Brother, but he was all right because we then went to Estancia Harberton, which has a lovely mature garden and large vegetable plot, and then to a secluded bay where we donned huge plastic trousers, boots and life jackets and paddled down the river and into the bay, seeing cormorants and and ibis, before beaching at the old Harberton slaughter ground, with its old greyish fences, and backcloth of a splendid mountain. Finally a stop to admire the light on the Channel and some trees bent double by the wind. Then back to Ushuaia to buy a scratch supper of simple cans and bread, which the Brother enjoyed so much that he insisted we do it again tonight and tomorrow.