I’m back from Chile and finally ready to start blogging about it.  In the interim, though, I had some wisdom teeth extracted a couple of days ago so if this post sounds a little loopy then my apologies, I can only blame the pain meds.

In typical Andy’s Travel Blog fashion I didn’t really go into my trip with any set expectations about what I should do or what I wanted to see, and instead just started reading some articles about things people enjoyed and sort of picked and chose based on what I thought sounded interesting.  I find that as I go on trips the trip will kind of tell me what it wants me to see, and I’m ok if that just means a lazy day in my hotel room reading a book while looking out at Lago Grey through the windows.  My number one mindset, especially while traveling alone, is to travel as if I will return someday.  That mindset helps me stay relaxed and not have some sort of urgent rush to go see everything possible.

The first thing I decided to do was on my first day in Patagonia.  From the town of Punta Arenas you can head south on route 9 until the road stops and then there’s about a 4km walk to a lighthouse called Faro San Isidro.  Sitting on the Strait of Magellan, it’s remote and supposedly a wonderful sight.

Hopefully you saw my first vlog of the trip (in this post) and the second one is uploading literally as we speak.  I’ll go into more detail about this hike, and you’ll see some of it, in the second vlog, but I wanted to share one of my favorite pictures ever as this week’s picture of the week.  You’ll have to wait for the story of how I found this penguin, but it was so dang cute I just couldn’t resist posting it!  I hope you enjoy and I can’t wait to share more with you!

For the photographers: [note: links below are to an affiliate partner website which may pay me a commission should you click the link and make a subsequent purchase] I cannot believe I forgot to bring my 70-200 on this trip!  I was originally going to bring four lenses and honestly just forgot to pack my 70-200 and my 50mm.  This was shot with my Sony a7rII with the 24-70mm G Master lens.  I shot it at f2.8 to separate the penguin from a very busy background, ISO 100 and a shutter speed of 1/50s.  I wish I could upload this at full resolution so you could see all the detail of each feather!  This just took some simple Lightroom adjustments before it was ready, I really feel like I nailed it in camera (which is a big step for me!).