My Spanish skills have a long way to go yet, but it is a wonderful feeling to listen to a member of the Huentemo community, standing on his own soil, and understand most of what he is telling me about his life here. The island of Chiloé is isolated from the rest of Chile not by its location, but by its culture. The population consists of a high proportion of indigenous people like Hugo who I met after walking several miles along the Pacific beaches to the ...

One of my favourite moments aboard the Evangelista (usually known by the name of the ferry company Navimag) was our arrival at Puerto Eden early on the second morning. The previous day had been overcast and damp, so it was nice to wake to blue skies and sunshine here at the only inhabited location between Puerto Natales and Puerto Montt. As we lowered anchor, at least a dozen small boats left the shore to take delivery of the twice-weekly supplies. With only abou...

Only 6 people made the crossing on the small boat to Puerto Williams, causing the customs men in each country to open their small offices to stamp our passports. I had previously made contact with Patty who rents rooms in her home and offers home-cooked meals in the evening, so I was soon settled there. A good choice, since the restaurants in this small town look like they open only when they feel like it. Two days later, and I was hiking over an 800m pass just ...

A hiker from Wisconsin suggested that I could go to "The Ice" when I told him I was heading to Ushuaia and had plenty of time to kill. It's a possibility I replied, but I don't think my budget will stretch to it. The trouble is though, once you get this far and find yourself rubbing shoulders with people who have been there, it is suddenly very tempting to pull out a credit card and blow the next six months budget on a 12-day cruise across the Drake Passage to th...

We were still half an hour out at sea when I spotted the first one. I thought it was a sea bird until it dived, then it's sheer speed and agility through the water gave it away, re-surfacing like a bullet along the top of the water. This was my first sighting outside a zoo of one of the most abundant residents in this part of the world - a penguin. On land of course, they look very different. As the boat drew up close to Isla Magdelena, the sight of 60,000 of th...