40 TRAVEL+LEISURE | APRIL / MAY 2020
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From left: Astrid
Perkins takes
a dip in a tide
pool near the
lodge; Magellanic
penguins don
tuxedos and tails for
a party on Penguin
Island.entirely coated in guano—and then Sea Lion
Island—louder, more raucous, way more of a party
than Cormorant Island.
There are far more famous places to see
wildlife in Patagonia. For example, people throng
to the greatest nursery for right whales on the
planet, located some 300 kilometers up the coast in
Peninsula Valdés. But the thing about Bahía
Bustamante is that no one else is there—no
buildings on the horizon, no tour buses, no people
who look so much like you that you’re reminded of
your tourist self. My wife had been there by herself a
decade ago, and told me how unusual it was to be
able to visit the animals on their own turf. We
counted 21 different kinds of creatures, which my
kids agreed was a lot, but they also mentioned that
none of them were penguins.
Naturally, my wife and I were a little worried
about delivering on the fat-flightless-bird promise
as we approached our last stop of the morning:
Penguin Island. Magellanic penguins come to this
and similar islands along the coast to have babies. By
the time we arrived, their chicks, we were told,
would be almost grown. Many would have already
left the nest. We steeled ourselves.
But when we hiked onto the island, we found...
penguins. Lots of penguins. A surfeit of penguins.GETTING THERE
You'll need to make at least one
connection to get to Buenos
Aires from Southeast Asia.
Aerolineas (aerolineas.com.ar)
and LATAM (latam.com) both fly
from B.A. to General Enrique
Mosconi International Airport in
the city of Comodoro Rivadavia,
a two-hour drive from Bahía
Bustamante. The lodge can
provide transfers to and fromthe airport for US$355 each way.
A more affordable option is to
rent a car at the airport.TRAVEL ADVISOR
Maita Barrenechea (maita@mai
10.com.ar; 54-11/4314-3390), a
member of T+L’s A-List, has a
close relationship with Bahía
Bustamante. She can plan a tour
of Argentinean Patago nia that
includes a visit to the lodge.So many penguins that, walking among them, you
could feel their breath.
Do you want to know the most inspiring thing
about Magellanic penguins? It’s not that they
swim roughly 24,000 kilometers per year (which
doesn’t sound like that much fun, actually). It’s
not that they mate for life (very traditionalist,
penguins!). Rather, it’s that they’re not trying to
track their steps or do a cleanse or go back to law
school. It’s their satisfaction with being penguins.
We watched them very close up—for some reason,
they aren’t spooked by humans, or very interested
in us at all. Even though what they were doing—
laying under a bush, passively molting—seemed
boring, they were I guess what you’d call happy?
We did so much in five days. We saw a whale
skeleton. We had lunch on a tiny, hidden beach
and hiked across rock formations where there
were enormous tide pools so deep we couldn’t find
the bottom. We lay in the sun and watched the sky
and let our brains rest. My son and daughter each
saw their first shooting star.
And we did end up locating nowhere, at least
for brief periods. You would imagine, sitting out
there alone in a vast empty landscape, that the
world would feel big and you would feel small.
But that turned out not to be the case for me.
I think, for children, the world is very small—you
can’t grasp the concept of a kilometer, or a
country really. Then as you get older, the world
gets bigger and bigger, and seems endlessly full of
undiscovered places. But at some point the world
begins to shrink again. You realize how small
the globe really is, that there’s nothing infinite
about it. And that coincides with the realization
that a life is quite finite. That’s how it felt to me, in
the vast geographical middle of nowhere. But
there was something reassuring about it—just
knowing that nowhere is lurking out there
somewhere, behind the built environments and all
the strip malls, undergirding everything. With the
added benefit of penguins.bahiabustamante.com; doubles from US$135.