After driving around a lot the previous day, I decided to have a more leisurely day and take a boat tour to see some glaciers. When the tour started, it looked a bit rainy, but not over the lake itself, so instead of the rain, I got sunny weather and rainbows.
A short while later, the boat passed a cormorant colony at the side of cliff.
After a couple of waterfalls, the first glacier along the way was the glacier at Monte Balmaceda.
A short time later, the ship docked and it was time for a short walk along a small lake towards the Serrano glacier
I just love posing with glaciers...
There was a small zodiac on the lake that offered short tours closer to the base of the glacier. (The walking path ended at the viewpoint some distance away from the glacier.) Oddly, I was the only one in the group willing to pay for this, so I got my own private boat tour with the two guides.
It was a nice, relaxed day on the boat. The next day, I was driving down gravel roads again, but not any great distances. I drove to the Milodon Cave Natural Monument, which is on the way up to Torres Del Paine National Park. For most people it's a nice rest stop along the way to Torres Del Paine, but I didn't want to do the detour when I was driving up there, so I went there on a separate trip.
The cave itself is a bit dull. It's mainly a big horizontal gap in the rock, so it doesn't have that small cave entrance with a big room behind it, which is the more common image of caves. This is more like a rock overhang. But the view is spectacular and I spent more time sitting outside the cave, looking at the scenery than in the cave.
Also, having your back towards the cave, the plastic milodon was out of view. (Milodon remains have been found in the cave and someone though it would be a good idea to put a life-sized milodon statue in the cave. I thought that it looked silly, out of place and a bit like a cheap amusement park attraction. But evidently, somebody made a right decision. Most of the people visiting the cave just took a quick walk through it and then spend much more time posing for pictures with the milodon).
But except for the big cave, there are also two smaller caves, a natural archway and a rock formation called "Devil's Seat" nearby. And a well marked hiking trail (well, half of it is hiking trail, half of it an unused gravel road) to get there. It's rarely used, since most people just stop at the Milodon cave on their way to Torres Del Paine, so I got it almost to myself that day. (There were a couple of campers next to the Devil's Seat, but the rest was a walk in solitude.)
By now, the vacation was getting close to the end and I had to drive back to Punta Arenas. But I had enough time to make a short detour to the penguin colony at Otway Sound. While there were a few penguins to be seen, the visual impact was not even close to the sights of Magdalena Island, where I had been five days earlier. Still, penguins are cute, regardless of numbers, so it was worth driving there, even though the roads were questionable. (When you turn off from the main road onto the gravel road, there is '20 km' sign next to the road. Then a '19 km' sign, and so on. But that's not really the distance to the penguin colony, but rather the length of the gravel road. At the end of that, a pothole infested mud road follows for 13 additional kilometers. It was this road, which made my rented car look like this. But it was still worth going there...)
Back in Punta Arenas, it was the first time during the trip that I had a hotel room with a bit of a view (in the other two hotels in Punta Arenas and the one in Puerto Natales I always had rooms with views of walls and backyards). Looking out there, I didn't really mind not having a view before.
But in the evening, it turned out that the view was quite nice indeed.
The center of Punta Arenas does not leave much room for new buildings, so the designer of the breakfast room of the hotel didn't have much space to create the 'winter garden' feel.
Finally, this was the last day in Punta Arenas. With all my bags packed, there was little to do but to walk around for a few hours through the streets and along the seashore.
On last bit of irritation: How can you lay out a pattern of tiles and not notice that three of them are facing the wrong way? (All the other tiles around the path were orientated properly, only these three were rotated.)
But then it was time to get to the airport and catch the flight home. And to get a last look at the Ilyushin, which was, once again, waiting at the airport for another flight to Antarctica. (Which I would have preferred to flying back home...) Standing slightly apart from the other planes, slightly larger and, with the sagging wings, slightly older looking, it gave a bit of an impression of a Mother Goose kind of bird, watching over the flock.
I had window seats all the way home and the weather on the flight was mostly fine. (Except for an extremely impressive storm cloud over Argentina, which kept flickering with lightning like one of the Tesla generators in old Frankenstein movies. The flight path went well around it, but it illuminated the outside for almost half an hour, so it was quite a large thunderstorm. But it was on the other side of the plane, so I haven't got any pictures of that.) So I was able to have some good views of the glaciers in Patagonia.
Closer to Santiago, the landscape became a lot flatter and more arable, with the Andes looming in the background.
Leaving Santiago, it was almost sunset, so my last view of the Andes before going home was in the evening light.
It felt like an appropriate 'end on lingering view of sunset - fade to black' visual ending for the vacation. (Even though about 17 hours of sitting in airplanes and about 24 hours of travel still lay ahead. But I got home in the end.)
