We already know several hot springs between alaska and fireland, but the “termas geometricas” in chile is something special. 18 different pools with different water temperatures squeeze into a small gorge in southern chile.

Why does someone who wants to do good on a large scale face so much suspicion? that’s what happened to douglas tompkins and his wife. In 1990, the founder of the North Face company and co-owner of Esprit sold a large part of his shares and invested in nature conservation. In chile (and later in argentina), he bought large, contiguous areas of rainforest to protect them through sustainable nature parks. There were many opponents who distrusted him and made the purchases difficult or even prevented them.

His promise to hand over the protected areas “pumalin” and “patagonia” to the chilean state was posthumously fulfilled by his wife kristina in 2018. he himself died in a kayaking accident in 2011.

in the close neighborhood of puerto deseado is a small island offshore. The name penguin island is already the program, besides sea lions and numerous bird species there are two penguin species living here. 30.000 magellanic penguins breed here and about 40 years ago some rock penguins had chosen this island as their breeding ground and since then this colony is growing. In the meantime there are already over 2000 animals. The young ones were molting and looked a bit ugly. Susan hunt, the australian zoo director in perth once said to us: “you have to be a mother to love it”, but at that time she meant a baby mammal.

Some young rock hoppers dared to go into the water for the first time – you could feel their indecisiveness. When a wave surprised them, they hurried back to land.

It had worked out in the very last minute! we were able to book a trip to the antarctica, despite the corona pandemic (but with negative pcr test) we were able enter the cruise ship and had been on board for 10 days, 4 days (forth and back) sailing through the drake passage.

What an experience! Special thanks to the crew of the new minerva. you guys were great!

We reached ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, 7 ½ years after our start in halifax (canada) and 102,000 kilometers driven. The city welcomed us with bright sunshine and no wind, but then soon showed that things can be different. At night, the temperature dropped to 3 degrees and it snowed in the surrounding mountains. High summer in ushuaia.

This glacier is one of the tourist highlights of argentina and is one of the world natural heritage sites managed by unesco. The glacier originates in the andes at an altitude of almost 3000 meters and extends to lake argenino, which is only 185 meters above sea level. What is amazing to me is that the glacier lies in the same geographical latitude as frankfurt, namely at 50 degrees south.