After our trekking adventures in Torres del Paine, we took a short bus onward to Punta Arenas. Here, we were on the mission to see king penguins! Luckily we had two days in town, since for the first day all tours were fully booked! We had not expected that. Luckily we did get on a tour on our second day… a long day tour! The only way to get to the king penguin colony is either by tour or by rental car. Since rental cars were very expensive, we opted for a tour, but regretted it later. It was not very well organised, everything took forever and we spent most of the day waiting, sitting around and seeing things that were not interesting such as a dusty museum and a kitschy square.

Finally we arrived at the king penguins, where we had one hour to see them (and take as many photos as possible). They were not as far away as we thought, but even with our 300 mm lens it was hard to capture them well. But they were awesome!! I especially liked the funny way they are walking around with their wings spread out for better balance.

There was one really big group and then one spot with fewer penguins. Too bad there was an ice cold wind going on, watching the penguins would have been more enjoyable otherwise. All in all, it was really cool to see these gigantic penguins. If we’d do it again, we would go for the rental car though…

Our last stop in Patagonia was the city „at the end of the world“ – Ushuaia. To get here took us about 12 h from Punta Arenas. Originally we would have had some more days here to do some more hikes, but our buffer days melted away when we had some waiting days here and there during the last weeks due to full buses, campings or tours.

In the end we just had one full day left, so that we decided to make the most of it and book a sailing tour in the Beagle Channel which was much recommended online. And it was really cool!! Only the weather…not so cool. It rained for most of the tour and we had to stay inside for a long time. Watching some more penguins was fun, but I hope our camera didn’t get any damage through using it in the pouring rain!

Weather got a bit better (read: less rain but still rain and grey clouds) when we got to the cormorant rocks, where these birds are nesting. Some of them already had chicks which they were feeding – sooo cute!!

The last stop was a small sea lion colony. It was fun to watch these playful animals jump into the water, swim about and fight (tease) each other. There’s some animals that always put a smile to my face, and seals are definitely one of them!

As mentioned, it was a great tour and for sure this would have been an awesome experience if the weather was better. After all this rain, the wind and cold of the past months, we were pretty done with Patagonia at this stage though! Ready to board a plane up North to sunny Buenos Aires…