First we went to Punto Tombo, a penguin reserve. It was a beautiful open land. The sky looks gigantic, extending without beginning and without end, and the sea sparkles and glitters as if full of drowned fireflies. Thousands of Magellanic penguins come here to mate and hatch chicks. The reserve is a giant collection of rocky hills on the side of the ocean, and penguins and guacanos roam freely. The park is a brilliant set up – visitors aren’t allowed to interact with the penguins, merely to walk a set path through their natural territory. You may not take anything from the park – not even a feather or a pebble, and you certainly can’t feed or pursue the penguins (they made sure to tell us not to bother a penguin by trying to pose with it). The result is, the penguins are completely un-domesticated. And don’t think you can’t get close to them – they’ll walk across the path and go right next to you.
The penguins swam 6,000km from Brazil to their nests in Argentina. The penguins migrate before their food (anchovies) so that the fish will arrive right around when the eggs hatch. As a result, though, the penguins have to keep swimming back to find their food. Male and female partners will switch off turns, with one swimming 600 km (6-7 day trip there and back) to go eat, while the other stays with the nest and the egg. Penguins are monogamous. The males dig out nests, generally small caves or just indents under scrubs. They seem more constructed to protect from the sun and to make sure the eggs aren’t super obvious to predators, than to offer any real shelter. The young males use their nest to attract a female, and the pair will return to the same nest every year. Eggs weren’t visible yet, but that may just be that the penguins were laying on them. Everywhere penguins were sprawled napping or waddling along. These creatures are clearly not made for walking. They tilt their head side to side, probably trying to make up for having eyes on either side of their head, and stick out their chest and wings for balance. Come to think of it, they’re not really graceful at speaking either. The whole process seems such an effort: the penguins toss their heads back, mouths open upwards, and pump themselves like bellows, their chests jerking in and out. These penguins would call out several wheezing blasts, as if warming up to speaking, then cry out a buzzing note that sounded a bit like an elephant trumpet or a falling vuvuzela note. I spent some quality time trying to imitate them, and no one pecked me to death, so they can’t have been too offended.
This is pretty much what penguins look like when they talk.
We did see some penguins having sex, an affair involving a lot of flapping on the part of the male, who was on top. The female didn’t seem particularly thrilled, or really invested in the process. According to our guide, penguins are pregnant for 40 day sand always lay two eggs, presumably to have a spare in case the first one gets killed. The weird thing is, scientists found that if they remove an egg from the nest, the penguin will lay another. And another. Up to five or more eggs in total. This extra egg laying only happens during the first week – if the scientists remove an egg a week later, the female can’t do anything to replace it. Now, to me, this all sounds a little impossible. It seems that the woman keeps sperm alive inside her, but cached away from her eggs for a week, just in case she’ll need to fertilize them.
So far, scientists don’t know how long these penguins live. They started monitoring them 50 years ago, and so far, the penguins are still going strong.
After some time to explore Punto Tombo, our bus took us to a small Welsh town called Gaiman. The town is a surprise – a sudden burst of life in the midst of endless tracks of shrubs and nothingness. It’s the river that gives the tree life, and lilac trees abound. We went to a traditional welsh tea house where they served us black tea with milk and a huge collection of treats: tea cakes, lemon cake, ginger bread, jelly rolls, bread and butter, biscuits and cookies.
Argentina, which even welcomes immigrants in its constitution, gave the Welsh land and sheep to encourage their coming. The immigrants would have gone to the US if not for the Civil War, and instead became part of the effort to populate Patagonia, a land stolen from the native people.
Our final stop was Trelew, another Welsh town. A few flamingos swam in the river there, and in general, the town looked pretty humble, but we mostly just saw the museum. According to guidebooks, the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio is the reason to go to Trelew. Inside we found complete skeletons of dinosaurs like the T. Rex and Stegasaurs. Dwarfing all of them was the Argentinosaurus, whose tibia was taller than a person.
Traveler’s Tip
We scheduled the trip with InterHabitat for US $55. They send a bus to pick you up at your hostel, and a guide gives info in both Spanish and English. We were taken to Punto Tombo, where we had to pay the entrance fee, then to Gaiman, where we could purchase what we wanted (AR $65 for tea, though a fellow hostel member had to pay more because he went to the tea house that Princess Diana had visited. His opinion was it wasn’t worth the extra cost). Then the trip brought us to Trelew for an hour, the museum price also not included. InterHabitat is handy for giving you transport and background information on the places, plus it does let you choose what you pay for.
No comments:
Post a Comment