Ralph Lee Hopkins, National Geographic Photography Expert
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Daily Expedition
Reports
01 Nov 2013
Punta Arenas and Magdalena Island, Chile, 11/1/2013, National Geographic Explorer
Aboard the
National Geographic Explorer
Patagonia
We had our first full day in Chile today as we continued southwards along the Patagonian coastline. After breakfast we had two options to tour Punta Arenas. There we had a city tour which visited museums and the Patagonian Institute. The city center was very quiet as today was All Saints Day, which is national holiday here in Chile and it is celebrated in a similar way to the Day of the Dead in Mexico.
The other morning option was to visit Magallanes National Reserve for a good leg-stretch in a beautiful southern beech forest. It felt great to stretch the legs a bit after a day at sea.
In the afternoon we stopped at Magdalena Island, a new destination for National Geographic Explorer. We used local tour boats to go ashore to see a Magellanic penguin colony. We walked up to the top of the island to explore the old lighthouse and had stunning views of the Magellan Strait. It was a wonderful day to experience both a bit of the local culture and some time exploring this stunning part of Patagonia.
Stephanie is a marine mammal scientist who began her career studying finback and humpback whales from a small isolated lighthouse island off the coast of Bar Harbor, Maine. This project—an effort to identify individual whales by matching dorsal fin ...
Ralph Lee Hopkins is a popular photo instructor and geologist who also serves as an expedition leader aboard the National Geographic fleet. He served as a photographer on the historic Arctic Expedition for Climate Action in July 2008 and has traveled...
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The furthest south you can travel on any Southern Hemisphere continent is to Cape Horn, the end tip of South America and the northern boundary of the Drake Passage. Here, the stories of shipwrecks and dreadful storms are abundant, our hopes for sightseeing this iconic landmark are mixed, but our ship will attempt to please our expectations once more. The legendary rocky promontory was the obligatory route for shipping trade until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The rugged silhouette of this island has little resemblance to a horn. The Dutch navigators who named it in 1616, Schouten and Le Maire, were honoring the city of Hoorn but flawed translations succeeded over history. The swell that rolled our ship seemed not to affect the Zodiacs that got us ashore. The view from the top of Cape Horn is breathtaking: a horizon of infinite sky and dark seas. The treeless island has a handful of red-roof buildings, a reminder of the Chilean Navy presence. The lighthouse keeper, his wife and son opened up their home for us; their hospitality ranges from a little chapel to the mandatory postal service and gift shop. The light tower has a collection of flags and mementos left by modern sailors that pay homage to their travels to the edge of the world. A wooden trail led us to the monument to the mighty albatross, the faithful companion of sailors of the southern seas. Our voyage is coming to an end. The wind that swept our steps in Patagonia seems as it happened ages ago, but we remember well the first sight of a flying condor. Tomorrow we all depart in different directions but, until then, we keep looking outside for a last glimpse of the Land of Fire .
Overnight, we made our way south to the Beagle Channel, a more southerly route through Tierra del Fuego than the Magellan Strait, and one first charted by Captain FitzRoy of HMS Beagle in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Most of our overnight transit involved a long sail around the Cordillera Darwin, named, of course, after Captain FitzRoy’s famous companion-cum-naturalist on board that celbrated vessel. A gentle early morning wake-up call from our expedition leader alerted us to a spectacular morning in Garibaldi fjord with snow-capped mountains and a retreating blue-ice glacier calving steadily ahead of us. Zodiac cruises were announced and a morning’s exploration commenced with much of interest to see, including a fledgling condor on the lower slopes of the fjord whom we quickly befriended. In the afternoon we repositioned some 50 miles eastward to visit Yendegaia National Park, a private-public collaboration between the Chilean government and a private foundation run by Douglas and Kris Tompkins that seeks to conserve some 95,000 acres of a former estancia as a wildlife preserve. Yendegaia, in the Yamana language, means “Big Bay” and our afternoon hike in perfect early spring weather conditions afforded numerous opportunities for wide vistas within the fjord. Our destination along a wooded coastal trail was an archaeological site, a seasonal encampment of the Yamana people, with hut circles and associated midden mounds, the latter comprising huge quantities of blue mussels. The settlement was perfectly situated, with two broad and shallow bays, perfect harbors for canoes (another name for the Yamana is the “Canoe Indians”) and a promontory with wide views of the surrounding area both on land and at sea. In the bay we saw Patagonian crested ducks and kelp geese and, as we returned, an exceptionally good sighting of a short-eared owl that may have been flushed out into the open from its more usual habitat by a swarm of small birds seeking to identify a potential predator. During evening Recap we sailed past the Argentine town of Ushuaia, founded by the Anglican missionary Thomas Bridges, our ultimate destination, en route for Cape Horn.
The Chilean fjords are a maze of islands and channels. It is hard to imagine early explorers weaving through unknown territory and searching for routes through and between the islands. Early this morning when darkness still engulfed the landscape we cruised through a very narrow passage called Canal Gabriel, not to be missed though as we would go through the same passage later in the day. But for the morning the plan was to go to the very eastern end of Seno Almirantazgo (Admiralty Fjord) to Jackson Bay and the private reserve of Karukinka. Our visit to the area had been introduced by Melissa Carmody representing Wildlife Conservation Society. During the 1990s a company from the U.S. purchased about 680,000 acres of Tierra del Fuego bordering Seno Almirantazgo. The land contained native forest that the company planned to log and turn into pulp. Locals opposed the plan and fortunately for this wilderness the company failed. Goldman Sachs bank purchased the assets of the company and in 2002 decided to donate this piece of property, which is 50 times larger than Manhattan, to the New York based NGO. So now this unique landscape and habitat is protected and we were extremely fortunate to be invited by WCS to visit. The morning began with a spectacular sunrise over Karukinka. Any one awake early in the morning got first looks at the rugged skyline behind Jackson Bay and some of the wildlife including black-browed albatross that nest on one of the nearby small islands. Soon after breakfast we were given the plan for the morning by the expedition leader, Lucho. Landing at Jackson Bay we found a trail to a lovely waterfall. Also we discovered huge marine mammals, Southern Elephant Seals, resting on not only the beach but even high in the grass meadow and even in the small river draining the valley inland. Many, many photographic images were captured of this lovely spot. Even the wind had dropped for our late morning return to the ship, but it had started to sprinkle rain. For the rest of the day and the evening we cruised past some of the spectacular scenery of the southern end of the vast Chilean fjords. And in the late afternoon we again passed through Canal Gabriel and were able to see this impressive landscape. We were even able to enjoy an impromptu BBQ of sausages prepared by the galley and hotel staff on the back deck of the ship.
