Translated, this means “Sandy Point” – and yet there is no sand in sight. 
No worry. We notice that we are not alone here. Our friends on the Norwegian Sun are here for the day as well. We take our time since we have a couple of hours until we have to meet in the theater for our tour. When we do meet, we find the entire tour organization process extremely disorganized and even chaotic. All of our nice travel partners have turned into big green meanies. We wait through all the mish-mash and finally make it to the tender, and then to the bus.
Punta Arenas is a city of about 200,000 people and is located right on the Strait of Magellan. The city began to prosper during the California gold rush in the 1800s. Ships sailing between the east and west coasts of the United States would travel through the Strait and use Punta Arenas for refueling and supplies. According to our tour guide, most of the people here are natives from many generations back. People born here virtually never leave and very rarely travel anywhere else. This is the only place they know.The windows are too dirty to take pictures through and, as sweet as she is, we can only understand a portion of what our English speaking guide is saying. Everything she talks about requires the words “very important” to describe them, we find this engaging. It is 75 miles north of the city to Ottoway Sound where the penguins reside. It seems as if at least half of that distance is down a dirt road. The trip takes 1 ½ hours. We stop only to take a photo of these Emu looking birds.
When we arrive at the penguinarium, we find crowds one would expect at Disneyland on a summer Saturday. But it is worth it. These birds are very cool. 
We have to stay between the ropes. They are Magellan Penguins and they live in burrowed holes in the ground like moles. 
They are free to go wherever they want; ropes or not.This next one charged the pedestrian path and then drifted backwards looking up at us.
This caused everyone around us to clear a path for him. He then strode very coolly across the path right in front of our camera.As the path works its way towards the water there is a little observation area to look at the ones on the beach.
We also caught this giant rabbit bouncing amongst the penguins. He is about 2' from nose to tail and maybe 30 pounds.
The area was very beautiful. 
The people around us… not so much. Denise sped up at one point of pedestrian congestion to go ahead to a wider portion of the pathway and wait for Todd. At this point a slight little lady of about 5 feet and 60 years grabbed Todd by the back of his jacket, and used this grip to propel herself right past him while pulling him slightly backwards. In NASCAR they call this a slingshot maneuver; in Ottoway, Todd calls this simply jaw dropping and unbelievable (had he not experienced it). Almost immediately after Grandma Andretti made her move Todd decided to put his left hand down on his wallet in his front pocket and his right hand over the camera around his neck. As he bent and raised his right arm to do this his elbow caught another contender right under the chin. As he felt this he turned to the senior lady behind him and proceeded to apologize for this profusely, stating that he didn’t know she was violating his personal ass space (in different words of course). She gave him a look he hasn’t seen since his last divorce; eyes turning red, lasers cutting him to shreds. She probably would have yelled at him were she not so busy trying to put her jaw back in place. Todd made his move and escaped. 
This place is definitely not capable of handling 2 cruise ships on the same day.On the way back to the bus we really have to go to the bathroom so we veer in that direction only to find that they are closed! 90 minutes later the bus drops us off at the city’s main square. We start off in the direction of the vista point, up a big hill that supposedly has a view of the strait. Halfway there we still have not found a bathroom. There is no way we are making it all the way up this hill with bladders this full. We retreat in search of the “banos”. We find an underground pub back at the main square.
This place is very cool. 
If we had no other plans for lunch in this city we definitely would have stopped here for more than just a potty break.Back at the square there are all sorts of goods for sale.
We make a few purchases, the prices here are still very good. One of the things we buy is a llama statue about 1 ½ “ tall made from Lapis Lazuli. We pay less that $5 USD for this. Later you will see why We give the price. Another of our purchases here is this original work of art.
It is titled “Angelmo, Puerto Montt 1938” and it is based off of a photograph that the painter shows us in a book. He has done a wonderful job bringing the life out of this dingy old black and white photo. Later we would regret that we didn’t think of taking a picture of the artist and the work together. Our time in port is fast coming to an end. We make our way down to La Luna Restaurant. It is one that Todd found the most compelling recommendations for during his research. 
This city is well known for its crab industry. La Luna supposedly serves crab salad and cooked crab dishes that are out of this world. The review was perhaps an understatement. Boy howdy are we glad we came here! This place has a great environment. A massive beer and wine bottle collection adorn the walls and there is a pretty cool cork collection above the front door as well.
We are successful in communicating with our Spanish-only speaking waitress. The phrase “Dos mas cervesas por favor” comes in real handy as we enjoy this locally made beer. 
This is good stuff. We head back to the port and see bottles of pisco in Tiki type bottles and decide that we will enjoy these during our week in Buenos Aires. We stand in line for a seriously long time to pay for this. During our wait we make friends with Al and Lori from San Francisco. They are buying two bottles. It’s a shame the cruise line has to hold these until the end of the cruise. After what seemed like eternity but was realistically probably only ½ hour in line (with only 3 or 4 people in line ahead of us at the beginning. Everyone else just crowded up to the front of the line from the sides) Al and Todd formed an aggressive line defense team and we were up to the front in short order. We said goodbye and left for the tender. In line for the tender we notice a McDonalds ad which uses the phrase, “southest most McDonalds in the world”. Cute. We make it back on board and instead of just coughing up the pisco at the security point, we put the bag containing the pisco bottle onto the x-ray conveyor. They didn’t confiscate it! We really expected them to but they just let it slide - probably thinking that it was just a tiki souvenir. We should have gotten more bottles of that!Dinner time, and still no word from our table mates. Our waiter tells us that they were there last night while we were eating at the Windjammer. We, once again, enjoy our meal. We converse about the couple at the table in front of us who’s heads we look at the back of every night. We can’t help but notice that the barmaid visits their table every night, many times and hooks him up with all sorts of shots and asks him what he thinks of them. She oozes personality and seems to be his personal bartender. The wife sticks to her wine every night. If this were any other setting than this uber-expensive liquor world we’re floating on, we would more than likely have imposed ourselves on them by now because they are probably a lot of fun. But at this point we’ve got one credit card out of service and two deposits that have not been made into our accounts that we were certainly counting on. Good thing we’ve got that pisco tonight!
We leave the dining room and head straight for the Windjammer and grab 4 glasses of lemonade. We return to our cabin to find this evening’s towel art.
And it smells April fresh. We spend the evening on the balcony drinking our own not-so-authentic pisco sours and Todd finishes the last of his cigars as we exit the Strait of Magellan and cruise the Magdalena Canal.The sun doesn’t set until after 10:00pm seeing as how we are incredibly south at this point. We are in bed before the sunset because Todd has set the Alarm for 4:00am.
