Hey all!

Today, in the "end of the world", as the call Ushuaia, the most southern city in the world, we went to see the penguins through the Beagle chanel. Now, as someone who never really paid much attention to the waddlers, I have to say: they are so cute!! All of them. In everything they do. Sitting, lying down, walking, swimming, eating, staring at the water, staring at me, all of it is so cute. They swim like little torpedos, which I have no idea how they can since their wings look so small and weak. The moment I saw them, I had a flash back to the chipmunk movie where all of the chipmunks race around the world and save a little baby penguin. I watched that part over and over again, and secretly wanted a penguin for years, but never told my parents because I didnt want my baby penguin to be sad and miss its mom, like in the cartoon.

Over all, Tierra del Fuego is beautiful. Not nearly as powerful and intense as Torres del Paine mountains, but it has a very calming, silent, patient feel which reminds me alot of the calm, pacid lakes in northern Minnesota. Kind of funny, because they introduced the Canadian beaver down here to keep a certain type of tree under control. It turns out, go figure, that there are no preditors of the beaver down here, so its been killing all the trees, including a rare, endangered species. So they then tried to introduce the grey wolf, to kill the beavers. That didnt work. The beavers grew too big, for the wolf to kill, so now the wolves are just eating a few rare types of birds. Also endangered. Thus, the Argentinian government will pay $12 per beaver trapped. For some reason, I feel like anyone from Minnesota could have told them that introducing a beaver to their habitat would have been a bad idea... is that crazy?

Happy travels,

Teigan