There were several options for a boat trip from Ushuaia (including Antarctica!) but we chose a tour to a penguin breeding colony and it was definitely the right choice.  Penguins are absolutely adorable, and not something you often get to see in the wild.  The tour promised us that we would be able to “walk within the penguins” and it was the only trip in town that has permission to take tourists to this penguin island.

Flag trees on the way to the penguins

We stopped at a couple of scenic spots along the way and after about an hour on gravel roads we arrived at a ranch.  Justin and I had thought that the ranch would have a tour that involved ranchy things, but we were wrong about this.  It was actually a marine museum and research station and we got a tour of all kinds of bones and even got to see a dolphin being dissected.  That was smelly!

Scientists hard at work

Ok, so that´s not a cute penguin picture, but I´m getting to those!  We took a short boat ride out to the island and then had an hour walking around looking at the breeding colony.  There were Magellanic and Gentoo penguins.  The Gentoo are more rare and have orange feet while the Magellanic were plentiful, nest in burrows and are plain black and white.  And here are the cute penguins…

Us and Penguins! They were not afraid at all!!!

Penguins are noisy.

The ugliest penguin (also the cutest) napping in the sun

Hundreds of them

This one built it´s burrow under the stairs!

There are more penguin photos if you click on any of the above, and soon will be even more when we have time to do some more uploading.  The penguins were molting so some of them looked pretty scruffy, but so cute.  This was really an incredible experience!