February 2006

Air travel is really so astonishing. I woke up Friday morning and headed to LAX via Highway 1k and my gracious chauffeurs, Catherine and Nick. A few airplane meals and interesting conversations with fellow aisle-seated travelers later, I was in Patagonia. Before I could even register which continent I was on, I headed down the block to the local travel agency and boarded a bus to see penguins on the Straits of Magellan. I was worried that I might miss them: once they return to sea after molting and raising their young, the penguin colony basically turns into any other pretty island with a lighthouse. But clearly I needn't have worried. After a two hour ride (which I slept through entirely) I looked through my binoculars and realized that all the specks in the distance were penguins. We're talking about roughly 150 thousand of them. Yes, you read that right! While I didn't meet each and every one of them personally, I met enough of them to be thoroughly, thoroughly smitten.

Magdalena Island was actually visited by Sir Francis Drake. But you needn't know this history to appreciate the waddling, flirting, honking creatures we encountered. When we stepped off our boat, the penguins initially seemed a bit shy and sort of hurredly waddled away. There were thin ropes separating us from them and after a while, I felt a bit more like we humans were the zoo, especially since they looked at us with what seemed like the same curiosity that we were directing at them. And in the hour or so that we were on the island, they got increasingly comfortable--honking more and more in our presence, crossing the road with reckless waddling abandon. It was a loud, smelly, deliriously wonderful affair. and watching Chilean kids take it in was all the more fantastic (although one particularly cute 3 or 4 year old boy decided to imitate their honking the entire two hour boat ride home.)

And while the penguins provided a more than memorable first day to my journey, the day turned out to be all the lovelier when I met Laura, a wonderful woman from Bristol. As one does when travelling, we became instant friends and spent the next few meals together. She's a fascinating person--she designs sets in London and decided that since she has really not traveled very much in her life, she needed to see more of the world. When I met her, she was on the start of a 8 month journey by herself (impressive!). In addition to our mutual obsession over penguins, and the fact that we were both beginning our journeys, we chatted about traveling solo. She made a passing observation that its really only in this generation that so many women are traveling solo. The comment has really stayed with me. So few of our parents (male or female really) spent their twenties and early thirties exploring other countries on their own, but it's with our generation that you particularly find so many women going solo. I already felt grateful enough to have seen penguins, but that made me even more so.