Finally got to see some penguins up close yesterday but actually it was a bit of a dull outing on the whole. I much preferred my failed mission to try to get to Cabo Virgenes with the truck drivers. This was all too easy - just paid my pesos and got in the minibus with 2 Americans, 2 Germans and 3 Chileans and off we were. 90 minutes there along dusty roads and coalmines (as the guide kept pointing out as if it was something worth telling - I spent half my school years taking a bus past a coal mine every day...). Then an hour walking along wooden walkways through the grassy duneland behind the shore with the occasional group of penguins standing at their burrows looking bored. Most of them have already headed north, these ones are just the tail end of the thousands who spent the summer breeding and hatching here. Personally I found the most interesting thing the huge trees which were washed up on the beach as driftwood and which had been used to make fences. On the way back we did get the closest yet I´ve been to a ñandú (sort Patagonian ostrich type bird) and also saw an owl sitting on a fence post insisting he had nothing whatsoever to do with Harry Potter. And there were flamingos in the distance but they´re about as common as ducks here so nothing special. The guide also kept saying ´Look, there, like a condor but smaller.´ Yes, they´re hawks and they´re everywhere... ah well, he did his best to keep us ornithologically entertained, I´ll say that for him.
Later: reading Darwin and have now discovered why there are so many hawk like birds here. There are no magpies/ravens/carrion crows in South America and the hawks fulfill their function of cleaning up dead stuff.
