Patagonia
An Earthwatch Expedition
https://earthwatch.org/expeditions/trailing-penguins-patagonia
🗓️ January 7, 2026 – Atlanta Airport
We wanted to be sure we didn’t cut it too close in case there was bad weather or something. So we arranged a4-hour layover in Atlanta after our flight from Detroit. Then we will spend 10 hours on a plane to Buenos Aires. Then we’ll take a bus to a different airport and another plane to Trelew. Then we’ll take a cab to our hotel and pass out. Something like 32 hours door to door…in the same hemisphere.
And then we’ll go mess around with Penguins!
As usual, neither of us read any of the stuff they told us to read, so we don’t know anything about penguins or the study we’re about to participate in, or about Patagonia or Argentina for that matter. But we’ve been on a half dozen Earthwatch expeditions in the past, and we’ve always managed to bumble along.
The project lasts a week after which we’ll have a couple of days in Buenos Aires. And here we go!
🗓️ January 8, 2026 – Air Travel
OK, it’s not a refugee camp in Sudan, but it certainly sucks.
We flew for 10 hours to Buenos Aires in Coach on Delta. Then we had to take a bus to “the other airport.” Managed to do that. But then the nice man told us our flight was taking off from the airport we had just left. Get back on the bus. Ride for a little over an hour. Get to our gate. The sign does not say ‘Trelew’ at 13:30 as it’s supposed to. But the sign at the next gate says ‘Trelew’ at 14:30, and so does the big marquee with all the departures. So we get in that line. They put us in seats 1C and 1D and treat us very nicely. We fly for several hours. The plane stops. Not everyone gets off. We ask if this is Trelew. The answer is no. So we stay on for some more hours. Then we get off and get in a cab. We ask for the Hotel Libertador. The cab takes us. But when we get there it is not a hotel. And we are not in Trelew. We are in Ushuaia.
Back to the airport. They’re sorry. No one can imagine how that happened. They put us on a plane back to Buenos Aires. It is the same plane we just got off of. The crew is surprised to see us. We fly for some more hours. The nice people in Ushuaia told us we wouldn’t need new boarding passes, but they didn’t tell the guards at the Buenos Aires airport. We go to customer service. Customer service is closed. Etc., etc., etc. Everyone is very sorry and they give us a voucher for dinner. We eat something, but, of course, the voucher does not cover it. I want to e-mail our hotel and tell them we’ll be late, but there’s no juice in my phone. I need to charge it for which I need a converter because we are in Argentina. Luckily, I brought a universal converter. Unfortunately, it appears to be for some alternate universe.
🗓️ January 9, 2026
Made it to the hotel 48 hours after we left our house. Crashed. Got up at about 1:00 PM and went for a walk to the converter store. Came back and crashed. Went to dinner at 9:00 and met our new friends. They’ll be fine. Crashed.
🗓️ January 10, 2026
So it’s Susan and me, Brei the Australian diplomat, Julie the IT person from DC, and Kari the retired government lawyer from Sacramento. The staff consists of Ariel the leader and his assistant Josefina. We drove about 3 hours to get to Camarones from Trelew. It looked like Texas. Went for a little walk, took a little nap, went to the grocery store to get ingredients for negronis. Drank negronis. Went to dinner to a very small restaurant. There were no other tourists. In such a seriously meat-eating country, you might expect the meat to be better. Came back and went to bed. So far so good.
🗓️ January 11, 2026 – Happy Birthday to me
Ariel and Josefina picked us up at 9:00. At 9:10 a herd of wild ostriches ran across the road. We saw a whole lot of black buzzards feeding on the carcass of a sea lion. Guanacos, an animal sharing the same ancestor as a llama, all over the place. We got to the penguin colony and it blew our mind. An area the size of maybe 2 city blocks with penguin nests everywhere. Sometimes they’re a few feet apart, sometimes just inches. Penguins live in the water except during this three month period each year when they mate, lay eggs, and trade off which parent watches the nest and which one goes fishing. We are near the end of the cycle. Chicks are losing their down and getting ready to go to the sea. They’re almost as big as the adults. We go to specific marked nests, pull out the chicks (who aren’t happy about being touched but they are passive in their disapproval), weigh them and do about 8 measurements. Then on to the next chick, on to the next nest. The adults aren’t happy about it either, but they mostly just wait for us to finish. Pairs return to the same nest for many years. This project is in year 10. No one knows exactly where they come from or where they go. There are related projects trying to find out.
This coastline is as remote as you can get. Still, there are tourists.
Quite windy. We did about 12 nests in the morning and broke for lunch. Did 6 or so more and came back to the house for siesta. Then dinner. We all had tiramisu in honor of my birthday. Very nice.
🗓️ January 12, 2026
After we had spent about an hour measuring penguins Gabriela – the principal investigator – showed up. We split into two teams and measured a lot more penguins. Then we had a terrible lunch and went off to put microchips into penguins that didn’t already have them. Mostly chicks but a few adults too. We don’t get to touch the penguins. Only the staff is allowed to do that. We do the scanning and write stuff down.
Grab penguin.
Scan penguin with scanner.
If no chip, scan a chip.
Check number.
Stick chip in penguin using fancy chip-inserting syringe.
Scan again.
Record nest number and chip number.
Move to the next penguin.
Penguins are cute. Guanacos are cool. Ostriches are cool. Watching the adults feed the chicks is very cool. The sky is very blue. The water is even bluer. It’s fun to watch the penguins waddle to the sea. Going through the same 10 measurements – Weight, head length, beak length, beak width, beak depth, flipper length, foot length – all day is not quite as fascinating as you might think.
🗓️ January 13, 2026
The place we eat has my vote for the worst restaurant in the Western Hemisphere. There is no ordering. We get what they give us. Our vegetarians get what they give them. But our talk from Gabby the principal investigator was fascinating. She is a scientist. She wants to know things. She has to scramble for money and manage details of the project and so on. But the point of it is to learn something. Penguin populations are growing and shrinking in unexplained ways. Simple global warming models do not explain the changes. Penguins are not her real passion. Science is her passion. She was very impressive.
Today was hot and we worked hard. My job was to collect rocks and bring them to the nests where other people would glue permanent tags to them to mark the nests. And, of course, we weighed and measured a lot of penguins. All the data is written in tiny numbers in pencil in little notebooks organized according to a system intelligible only to Gabby, Ariel, and Josefina. I don’t understand it at all. Today, for instance, we made a list of the nests that were unoccupied this year in one section of the colony. Maybe a penguin pair will live there next year, and maybe it will be a pair they recognize from their chip numbers. So, we make a list of the nests. Then we have to make a check mark next to the nests that we listed. This was emphasized. It was not sufficient merely to list the nest. It was essential to put a check mark next to the number. Since I was incapable of grasping this, I collected rocks. It’s very sunny, so you need long sleeves or you get sunburned. My hands are all red and puffy. So I’m walking up and down this little hill carrying rocks, wearing long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, a canvas vest that identifies me as an Earthwatch volunteer, and a wide brimmed canvas hat. You would not want to smell me.
We ate in a perfectly lovely spot. The food, however, was inedible. Went back to the house for a bit of a siesta and cocktails. Cocktails and appetizers were lovely. Dinner was awful. Ariel said Argentinians don’t care about food, which is ironic considering the numerous possibilities the various immigrant groups can offer – Spanish, Italian, German, Welsh for example. They care about dessert. They buy ice cream by the kilo.
We live in a small house. There are two bedrooms, each with two beds, and there is a couch in the front room. There are five of us. I am the only man. There is one bathroom. We make it work.
🗓️ January 14, 2026
There are about 3000 nests in the colony. The project has been following about 150 of them for 10 years now. They try to measure each chick every three or four days. This is the last week of the study for this year. Today we measured the same nests we did on our first day. We cleaned up old marking tape and put on new tags and re-inked old ones. I somehow managed to super glue myself to a tube of glue. We trudged up and down in the sun. Then we broke for lunch and ate some terrible cold pizza. Then we trudged up and down some more. Then we got back in the van and drove our interminable distance back to the house listening to the atrocious noise that comes out of the radio. On the other hand, there was a family of ostriches strolling calmly down the road in front of us. The landscape is untouched. The water is fiercely blue. And we saw armadillos scurrying around.
Death is part of life. There are bones and carcasses and bits of carcasses everywhere.
🗓️ January 15, 2026
Last night we had tasteless chicken scallopini and salad. Today for lunch we had tasteless fish and chips. We did a fair amount of trudging up and down and measuring chicks and writing things down.
I’ve been trying to avoid looking at my phone. I went to Google something and accidentally got a peek at my feed. I’m very sorry I did. Whatever else it was, the penguin project has been a long way from real life. But now it’s over.
🗓️ January 16, 2026
It took a couple of hours in the van to get from Camarones to Trelew. Another few hours in the Trelew airport. Two-hour flight to Buenos Aires. Cab to the hotel. By then I’ve pretty much had it and I’m ready for a nap. But no, we set out on a walk. To visit things. The things we visit are mostly shops where Susan buys things. One place had native crafts from native people in the North. Masks, blankets, the usual. But there was one very cool object neither of us had ever seen before. The man said it was, if I understand correctly, the ball they use in the Inca version of polo. Very cool looking leather object about the size of a volleyball but hollow. We’re having it shipped.
After about 5 hours, we were sufficiently far away to take a cab back to the hotel. Stopped for a couple of negronis and a couple glasses of wine and a plate of calamari and some people watching. Very satisfactory. Back in the hotel for a very nice shower and very nice taking off of shoes, not in that order.
The Argentinians are just thinking about getting ready to go out to dinner. Susan is already asleep and I am not far behind.
Buenos Aires is a beautiful city. Mas Lindo del Mundo. There are beautiful women everywhere. Skater kids in the parks. Tattoos and piercings and the smell of weed everywhere. Lots of parks and lots of people hanging out in the parks. Lots of people shopping and eating in the cafes and walking around. Miles and miles of happy urban modernity. This laissez-faire attitude of the Argentinians leads me to think they’re a resilient lot; economic crisis will come and go but life will be lived. Not so long ago, the place was a dictatorship(occasionally backstopped by the US). Many thousands of people were killed or disappeared. The prisons were full of dissidents. The generals tortured and murdered and disappeared people at will. For years. It is not something that happens only in Congo or Uganda or only long ago. It can happen right now where there are adorable cuties with bare midriffs and pierced navels.
It’s a cliché to ask how the culture that produced Beethoven and Mozart could produce Treblinka and Bergen Belsen. But murderous fanaticism seems to be just something that happens to people in groups. Like epidemics. It’s both peculiar and perverse that Argentina was the destination of choice for both fleeing ex-Nazis and Jewish refugees who survived the camps. How do their descendants co-exist?
🗓️ January 17, 2026
Today was our tour with a tour guide and a driver. Her name is Ariella. She is Jewish. After a while, she determined that we are Jewish too, and we got the Jewish tour of Buenos Aires. A Jewish guy built this and a Jewish family owns that. This is where the bombing of the Jewish Embassy happened. This is the memorial to the Jewish something. This is the memorial to the Jewish something else. Also, we visited every tchotchke shop in a 20 mile radius. Also every flea market and street fair and street market. Also a synagogue. And a bookstore. And various fancy buildings. And a rose garden that she assured us was in fabulous bloom only a few months ago. All of which took a very long time. Finally, she released us and we went back to the room.
I had an expensive steak in the fancy restaurant in our fancy hotel, Loi Suites Recoleta Hotel. Meh – overcooked and under-seasoned. Then we hung out in the bar, met some friendly Canadians and got a little drunk. That was nice.
🗓️ January 18, 2026
Today we went to the famous Recoleta Cemetery where many famous Argentinians are buried in very large marble crypts. The theme is ‘ostentatious display of wealth’. We walked around and looked at it for a while. Some of the monuments are 200 years old. Others are very new. Some are falling apart. Others are meticulously maintained. Some have statues of angels and so on. Others have statues of guys with terrific mustaches and swords and epaulets. All of them are huge and marble. It was hot. After a while we went across the street to a park to people watch. Then we picked up our bags at the hotel and got an Uber to the airport.
Made it to the airport and many layers of passport control. Stand in this line. Show your passport to this guy. Stand in that line. Show your ticket and boarding pass to that guy. Stand in this other line. Scan your passport in this machine. Etc. & etc., At some point a nice lady gave me a piece of paper that said VIP LATAM lounge.
We went to the LATAM Lounge. They have soft lighting, soft furniture, food, and evidently unlimited alcohol. All free. I have no idea how we got there, but I didn’t ask any questions. Food was good. We will sit here for another hour, then 10 hour flight to Atlanta, 2 1/2 hour layover, 2 hour flight to Detroit. If all goes well, we will arrive at home about 14 or 15 hours from now.
🗓️ January 19, 2026
Flew all night and landed in Atlanta about 5:30 AM then back on a plane to DTW. I watched some movies. But when Susan asked, I couldn’t remember what they were.
I am carrying a backpack. 50 times a day I need to get something out of it, and 50 times a day I have to unzip every zipper and rummage around in every compartment. When I fail to find whatever it is, I start over. Unzip every zipper again and rummage around in every compartment again. Find it, whatever it was. Put it back. Repeat the entire process 10 minutes later. It drives me insane. Sleep-deprivation does not improve the condition.
🗓️ January 20, 2026
Somehow it’s the next day. What happened? We got home. Temp was 0°. Made it to airport parking. Car won’t start. Ice scraper broke scraping the ice off the windshield. Got a jump from the man. Didn’t have any US cash to tip him. Wife expressed disapproval. Spoke harshly to wife. Drove home in icy silence. Trip is over.