Punta Arenas is our most Southern destination on our travels, and what we have been aiming for since we landed in Mexico last August. Located at the bottom of the world it is the most southerly part of mainland America with only some rugged landscapes and large islands to the south that run to the southern tip of the continent, and then only the cold dangerous ocean to Antartica and the South Pole.

The town is the largest in the entire Patagonian region, but only has a population of about 130,000 people. Located on the Magellan Strait with Tierra Del Fuego opposite (the land of fire). The weather is somewhat random with strong cold winds and low temperatures but very harsh bright sun (the ozone layer is thin here, with the hole in the ozone due to our fondness of CFC´s. strong suncream is a must!)

Punta Arenas has a rather commerical town centre with a nice big Plaza and many multicoloured roof tops. but the town mainly consists of rather desolate streets, lots of random tin and timber boarded housing and a long empty cold shoreline. After a wander around the outskirts it really does feel like you are a long way from home!

The surrounding landmass is split up here due to tectonic movement between the South America and the Scotia Plate, and ancient glacier movement. Together these natural processes have created what is now called the Magellan Strait. This became a short cut across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean that not only shaved off valuable shipping time but also avoiding the dangerous transit around Cape Horn.

Punta Arenas means ´Sandy point´ which is a little odd as we have not seen any sand or any points for that matter. The original name was ´Magellan´ which refers to the explorer Ferdinand Magellan who was the first to navigate from the Atlantic through this strait and into the Pacific (He named it the Pacific because it was peaceful compared to the Atlantic)

Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese dude who switched over to Spain and then got permission to explore a route across the Americas though a suspected short cut, he set of with 5 ships in 1519 and after lots of drama found and naviaged the Strait on 21st October 1520. Then continued to circumnavigate the globe, unfortunately he was killed on route (bit of a bummer) but his remaining crew managed to drag themselves all around the world to Spain returning in 1522, just not feeling too well.

Apart from being the first to go around the planet, one other interesting result of this voyage was that it created the International date line for the world (the crew kept a detailed log but found that they were a day behind everyone else, which surprised everyone and thus the date line was created)

So there you go, a bit of history for you. We didnt know anything about this until we arrived and it is very interesting to be here where Magellan came by and opening up this part of the planet to the wider population.

We have spent our time undertaking our own dangerous voyage of exploring the town and countryside and eating lots of food. We are in Punta Arenas for 3 days before heading North for a while, then back here again to a few more days where we intend to visit some museums and learn some more about this area.

On the Magallan voyage the crew also discovered some animals that were new to Europe, one of which was ´a black goose that had to be skinned instead of plucked´ what they have found were Penguins !

There are Penguins here named after him called Magellan Penguins, which we are going to visit next, but we wont consider skinning or plucking them unless we really need to, but we willl let you know either way.