This morning I woke up and everything was frosty, it felt like being back home as it was only around 5 degrees.

Yesterday I travelled from Punta Arenas to Ushuaia which took around 12 hours, mainly in a bus but also a quick ferry ride and two stops at borders to exit Chilli and enter Argentina again. I sat next to a girl called Laura from Switzerland and we chatted quite a bit inbetween snoozing.

Today I went to see the penguins as part of an organised tour with PiraTour. We left the port at 8am and went by bus to Harberton Ranch. On the way we stopped to see the famous flag trees which have been bent into the flag shape by the strong winds.

It was then just a short drive to the ranch where we took a motorboat over to Isla Martillo.

This island is a nature reserve so only groups of a max of 25 people can visit at any one time. The island has a colony of around 12,000 Mallagenic penguins and a small colony of 80-100 Gentoo penguins. The Mallagenic penguins come to the island every year between the end of September for around 6 months to mate, raise their young and then malt before heading back to warmer climates. The young mature quickly – only taking 2 months to become independent and all the chicks have already left the island. The adults are monogamous and they dig a hole in the earth as their nest which they line with feathers and grass etc and they return to the same nest each year. You could get really close to the penguins – obviously you weren’t allowed to touch them, but they seemed perfectly happy to have people around.

We also saw the Gentoo penguins and these are slightly larger with orange beaks and feet. They seemed slightly more wary of people. These penguins stay on the island the whole time and make nests out of rocks. We were also really lucky as we got to see a pair of king penguins – these were much bigger with the distinctive colours on their chests and heads.

The island is quite large and everywhere you looked there were penguins. There were also quite a few Cormorants which are easily mistaken for penguins but can fly. We also saw albotros from the boat.

When we got back to land we went to visit the museum at the ranch which had numerous bones from a variety of marine life – it was really interesting to see the size of some of the animals and also to discover that killer whales actually have more in common with dolphins than whales.

The skull below is from a sperm whale. Up until the 1980s these whales were hunted for the oil they had in the top of their heads that enables echo location. This is now banned.

We then caught a larger boat to navigate through the beagle channel named after the HMS Beagle captained by Robert Fitzroy with Charles Darwin on board.

We stopped to have a look at the ‘end of the world’s” lighthouse on the way through. The photo on the bottom left shows were the two oceans come together.

We also stopped at a sea lion colony – the majority of the sealions were the south American variety but there were some fur sealions too.

A couple of the males had a bit of a fight over terroritory – the males have a mane, a bit like a lion.

It was an amazing trip and I’m so lucky to get so close to these animals in their natural habitat.

On the way home I wandered around Ushuaia- it’s a pretty town.

This evening I met up with Laura and we went for dinner, some delicious grilled trout, and a couple of drinks in the local Irish pub.