With an extra day in El Calafate after visiting Perito Moreno Glacier, we wandered over to this bird sanctuary, just a fifteen minute stroll north of town. We are definitely not bird-watchers, but thoroughly enjoyed our leisurely afternoon around the swampy grassland. And the big bonus: we saw our first flamingos in the wild.

A good hour bus ride outside of El Calafate (not to be confused with El Chalten) sits this rarity of a glacier, one of the extremely few glaciers in the world that is still advancing and currently large enough to hold the city of Buenos Aires. Walkways are built to bring visitors within 800 meters, close enough to appreciate its enormity. Every few years, the glacier will even touch land and form an ice dam when it meets up with Peninsula...

Patagonia in my mind is granite cliffs rising from fields of ice and snow, an idea probably sourced by strong branding from the Patagonia clothing company. In reality, most of Patagonia is dry, windy plains covered with knee high shrubbery. But we did find the Patagonia of clever marketing in the tiny town of El Chalten where a permanent population of less than 1000 people welcome tourists to the mountain range right at its doorstep. We had...

Tierra del Fuego was named when Magellan sailed past the island at the bottom of the Americas and saw smoke rising to the sky from fires set by the indigenous people. If you find yourself in Ushuaia, the park is absolutely worth a full day of wandering. The park is crisscrossed with a variety of hiking trails. It was a drastic change to see color again after a week in Antarctica, as well as plant and animal life on...

We had time in Ushuaia both before and after our Antarctica trip. One easy activity in Ushuaia is a hike up to see the Martial Glacier. To get there, just grab a taxi and tell them Martial Glacier; they’ll understand. Each trip only costs about 35ARS, and we hung around to find another couple to share a cab on the way back. There’s a chair lift for about 50ARS roundtrip, but we chose to save the money and take the pleasant hour...

On the trip back to South America, our ship stopped at Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands. This island is actually a caldera that blew open so wide that the main crater flooded with sea water. The volcano remains active, creating new craters every so often, most recently in 1969. The landscape was a stark change from where we had been in Antarctica, with black igneous rock dominating the color spectrum and the ice pack...

Our ship itinerary included a tour of an active research station operated by the Ukraine. Each scientist signs up for a one year assignment, and the station houses twelve people – all men. After the sea ice sets in, this dozen will see no other humans for up to ten months. The Verdansky station was originally a British station named Faraday, and the ozone hole was discovered here in 1985. It was an early indicator that while no humans...

While penguins were the most abundant wildlife, there were many other animals vying for attention. We found out that where there are penguins, there are seals and they were nearly as curious as the penguins, especially when they were in the water. These blubbery animals are huge up close and frighteningly speedy when slicing through the water. From the ship, we spotted numerous humpback whales and had one orca pod sighting. Admittedly, it is...

So many penguins! These flightless birds live only in the Southern Hemisphere and have definitely marked their territory in Antarctica. The remote location of their colonies severely limits human contact making these birds fearless and almost gregarious to visitors. Although we have to stay five meters away, stand still for five minutes and a curious penguin will invariably waddle closer to have a look at you. And there is definitely a...

Given the countless glaciers everywhere we looked, the seas were filled with icebergs and their beauty has a fleeting, haunting quality. Gliding through the ice-filled waters was like visiting an abstract sculpture gallery. The diversity of shapes, sizes and colors only opens the mystery behind how each chunk of frozen water earned its particular form.