March 4, 2011
Bahia Bustamante: Argentina’s Secret (and Private) Answer to the Galapagos
By DANIELLE PERGAMENT
THE first thing you notice is the scale of everything. The unending distance between towns, the unfathomable stretch of land between you and the horizon, the vast expanses of sky.
The next thing you notice is the landscape — or, more accurately, landscapes. In one spot, you’re surrounded by low, scrubby desert pocked with thorny bushes. And you think: this could be the Australian Outback, or maybe the American Southwest. But then you approach the ocean, the navy blue Atlantic with its frigid whitecaps and craggy coastline, and your mind calls up images of Nova Scotia or Ireland. Then from some point to the south: a flock of hot pink flamingos flies by, so close you could almost pet them. You picture South Florida, perhaps, or the Bahamas. But, in fact, you’re thousands of miles from any of those places.
This is Bahia Bustamante, a private sheep farm in Argentine Patagonia, sprawling over about 210,000 acres, owned by a soft-spoken man named Matias Soriano. Set right on the waters of the eastern coast, about 1,000 miles south of Buenos Aires, the farm is roughly the size of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Mr. Soriano, 41, welcomes up to 18 guests at a time, from September through May. Bahia attracts a certain kind of visitor — the kind who’s more traveler than tourist, who prefers roughing it to room service, who is happy to spend days kayaking, hiking, horseback riding or investigating Mr. Soriano’s private 65-million-year-old petrified forest — and then collapse with a scratchy lamb’s-wool blanket when the electricity shuts off at 11 p.m. But above all, it’s a place for people who will travel across continents to see a breathtaking combination of hundreds of disparate species, all converging on a single point on the map. Ultimately, that’s what drew me this far from home: I’d seen “Planet Earth,” I’d gone to the Bronx Zoo, I’d even come nose to nose with a hippo in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. But I’d never had breakfast with a penguin.
“Welcome to nowhere,” said Astrid Perkins, our 40-year-old rosy-cheeked guide (and Mr. Soriano’s girlfriend), as we pulled into what the staff members and farmhands who live here call “town” — whitewashed houses and a smattering of bright red picnic tables lining a rough dirt road along the beach. Half of these houses were built 60 years ago for the farmhands and their families; the other half (the ones a few steps from the beach) were added recently for guests, like my friend Lisa and me, who were visiting the edge of the world for a few days.
“Here’s the welcoming committee,” Ms. Perkins said, pointing over the hood of the Jeep. A few feet ahead, a dozen ostriches were walking toward us, curious but keeping a safe distance. They looked like a cast of ballerinas, their long necks craning above the car. Their prehistoric faces cocked slightly, examining us for a moment before they turned and glided away, the haughtiest of high school girls.
We drove on to our lodgings — a very comfortable, simply decorated house that would be our lodgings for the next week. (Rooms are $215 a night, including three home-cooked meals a day and all the malbec you can throw back.) All the guest rooms have a similar setup: two bedrooms, a neatly appointed living room, a modest kitchen and a porch a few feet from the South Atlantic.
Lisa and I dropped our bags and set out to explore. As soon as we started walking toward the water, we glimpsed a family of hares dash away, as two great egrets came in for a landing on the beach.
With such natural diversity, comparisons are inevitable to that other South America destination famous for its isolated and unique ecosystem — but for Mr. Soriano, the Galápagos, the Ecuadorean islands, aren’t a model, they’re a cautionary tale. The Galápagos receive more than 100,000 visitors a year, while Bahia Bustamante receives only about 400 annually. “The Galápagos are being destroyed by the traffic, and I won’t let that happen here,” he said. “We can accommodate 18 people at a time. That’s it.”
Mr. Soriano can keep things at that scale because it’s his land. Two years ago, the government turned the coastline and outlying islands into a national park, but the land is Mr. Soriano’s; he controls access to the ocean. And he’s quite happy to keep it that way.
“It’s been a family farm for over 50 years,” he said, scratching his woolly brown beard.
We were in the communal dining room, a cavernous hall lined with pictures of Bahia Bustamante in the 1950s. It looked exactly the same back then, only with horse-drawn carriages in place of Jeeps, and workmen in suspenders instead of baseball caps. We were sitting down to a lunch of spaghetti in tomato sauce and warm, garlicky bread.
For Mr. Soriano, protecting the eye-opening diversity of life here is an integral part of his business. “The government couldn’t protect the animals and the environment better than we are right now,” he said, “because we are controlling how many people come here.”
In few places in the world does such a variety of species exist in such proximity. First there are the domesticated animals — the sheep, dogs, cats and horses that roam freely over Mr. Soriano’s land. But traverse some of the hundreds of miles of roads that crisscross the pastures, fields, desert, dunes, beach and canyons that make up the property, and you might also see ostriches, foxes, armadillos and the majestic llama-like guanacos, wild cousins of the African camel.
You can watch Southern right whales breaching a few hundred feet off the beach and then see dolphins in the same spot the next morning. Sea lions surround themselves with their harems on the rocky shore, and sea elephants, with their trunklike faces, roll their blubbery bodies on the same sun-splashed rocks. Depending on the time of year, you might encounter more marine life: orcas, octopus, starfish, etc. (The “etc.” really is necessary.)
And then there are the birds. Bahia Bustamante is one of the Holy Grail destinations for ornithologists. There are hundreds of species: egrets, gulls, vultures, falcons, red knots, hawks, albatrosses, eagles, skuas, red plovers and several species that don’t exist anywhere else in the world. There are dozens of breeding grounds, including colonies of royal cormorants and rock cormorants. There are the giant petrels, which have six-foot wingspans and can fly 200 miles out to sea. And then there’s the steamer duck, which despite all physical evidence to the contrary, can’t take off and fly. I watched as they flapped their wings, got some momentum going — and for a second I thought, “maybe this time,” until they settled back down and quietly paddled away.
Although Bahia Bustamante isn’t an island, like the Galápagos or Madagascar, its isolated location means it essentially functions as one. “These animals have been left alone for generations without human intervention,” said Catherine Plume, a scientist with the World Wildlife Fund who has spent four years studying the species of southern South America. “And actually, they’re more closely related to animals from New Zealand and Australia than they are to other species in South America. When the continents broke off, these species were left here, blocked off by the ocean and the Andes.”
Bahia Bustamante has also been blessed with the sort of dramatic topography — points, capes, bays, all the pieces that make the coastline so jagged — that creates a safe place for animals to breed, according to Pablo Garcia Borboroglu, a biologist and researcher for the National Research Council of Argentina. Add to that the abundance of algae, seaweed and nutrient-rich water, he said, and you wind up with the perfect place for animals to live — or pass through, if you happen to be a right whale or a white-tufted grebe.
On our second evening, Lisa and I met up with our fellow guests — a conference of Patagonian sheep farmers, here to discuss sustainable and environmental methods of farming — in the dining room.
“It hasn’t changed much in half a century, and I plan to keep it that way,” said Mr. Soriano, pouring glasses of malbec from behind the bar. The room had turned dim and cozy, its huge windows overlooking the roiling Atlantic.
Mr. Soriano’s grandfather, Lorenzo Soriano, arrived on these shores in 1952 in search of seaweed. The young entrepreneur, who manufactured hair gel, needed it to make his products. Broke and desperate, the elder Mr. Soriano left his family behind in Buenos Aires to explore a place then known as Rotten Bay.
“When he got here, it was everything he dreamed,” the younger Mr. Soriano said with a laugh. “The shoreline was covered for miles with seaweed. Everyone thought he was crazy, but he saw the potential.” The rich find eventually led to what Mr. Soriano said was the world’s first seaweed farm, with 500 workers, houses for them and their families, a school for their children, and a thriving business. By 1968, the elder Mr. Soriano was doing so well he bought the two adjoining sheep farms, amassing a plot of over 200,000 acres.
Today, seaweed harvesting and sheep farming — not tourism — remain the primary sources of income for Bahia Bustamante. As far as Mr. Soriano is concerned, people who respect nature will always be welcome here — but the place is a farm first and foremost.
During our history lesson, dinner was served. Most of the food in Bahia Bustamante comes from within a mile of where we sat, including from the farm’s organic orchard and vegetable garden, which Ms. Perkins is expanding. All the flavors of our meals had the earthy taste of the land: warm lentil soup with hearty roasted vegetables; a green salad of bitter greens with sweet olive oil dressing; and platter upon platter of tender and salty fire-roasted lamb from animals that had been grazing outside only hours ago. We washed it all down with a few bottles of Patagonia beer. The place does have its high-end flourishes: the chef, who studied at the acclaimed Spanish restaurant El Bulli, also whipped up rich, creamy desserts each night to remind us of her provenance.
Since Bahia Bustamante doesn’t do any marketing of any kind — there’s a Web site, but the spot is not likely to be on a travel agency’s list, and you won’t be seeing a poster for it on a bus stop anytime soon — I was curious about how tourists ever found it. (I’d learned about it from Ms. Perkins, whom I’d met on a trip to Buenos Aires a few years ago.)
I asked Mr. Soriano how the farm had begun welcoming guests. “It was completely by accident,” Ms. Perkins answered for him. She tucked her curly blond hair behind her ears and continued, while Mr. Soriano looked on, amused. “Tell her about the German couple,” she said. “It was all because of a German couple.”
In 2005, two Germans, not realizing they were trespassing on private property, happened upon Bahia Bustamante and, at Mr. Soriano’s invitation, stayed for a few weeks. “They told some friends,” Mr. Soriano said. “We started getting requests, and soon enough, people were coming from all over to see the animals.”
The next morning at 6, Lisa and I were awakened by Ms. Perkins pounding at our door. We had a date with 50 sea lions and we were already running late. We drove to the far reaches of the peninsula, fluffy white sheep skittering out of the way as we passed, until we came to a colony of sea lions rolling, playing and barking at the surf. They seemed utterly unfazed by our presence.
By midday, we were back at the farm for a hearty bowl of vegetable stew; by early afternoon, we were ready to venture out again — this time by boat, to see a 100-year-old shipwreck. We returned by late afternoon, and promptly took a nap. No matter how hard Lisa and I tried to stay awake, every afternoon we’d collapse into a deep, immobile sleep — our hiking boots and fleece jackets still on, sunlight streaming through the windows. Exhaustion seemed unavoidable: you begin to live with the sense that you’re no match for the place. It’s huge and old and you are a mere fleck. Your brain just gets tired trying to comprehend it all.
(All of our trips were led by Mr. Soriano or Ms. Perkins, though they recently hired a guide. During our stay, Lisa and I were the only tourists, until the last day when we were joined by a quiet married couple from Japan and a loud Michigan woman named Dorothy and her silent preteen granddaughter. Once they arrived, we all took our outings as a group.)
By Day 3 — midway through our trip — time was taking on the same sense of expansiveness as the landscape. We measured outings in chunks of daylight, not minutes or hours. The day divided into mornings, afternoons and evenings.
It was one of our last mornings, and Ms. Perkins picked us up, again at 6 sharp. We were headed to what she called Penguin Island.
“We’re going to see some friends for breakfast,” she said, laughing. It was a blustery day, and our Jeep bumped along the coast, a handful of statuesque guanacos watching us from a rocky overhang. We drove on until we arrived at what appeared to be a muddy beach.
“The only time to come here is during low tide,” Ms. Perkins said as we walked across the flats, our boots making sucking sounds in the marsh. We followed our guide to a small patch of land that seemed to rise from the sea, a small hill composed of nothing but low, thorny bushes. Following Ms. Perkins’s lead, Lisa and I crouched down. And then, right there, not two feet in front of me, a little penguin stuck his head out from under one of the bushes. It looked me right in the eye for a moment, then, completely unperturbed, waddled past to the water. It was only then that I realized that 50 feet away at the shoreline, hundreds of the little guys were splashing in the water, diving for fish, bathing, playing with their friends. It was penguin heaven.
We walked into the bushes, slowly and quietly, as inconspicuous as three giants in bright windbreakers could be. Under almost every bush was a penguin nest; in each, two penguins rested on their egg, a portrait of monogamy (they mate for life), looking up as we passed, curious but not afraid. These were Magellanic penguins, each about two feet tall; they are indigenous only to southern Argentina, Chile and the Falkland Islands. (The penguins are classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as a near-threatened species because of oil spills and overfishing.) When the water gets too frigid, they’ll swim north to the warmer waters of Brazil for a few months before heading back next fall, to this exact island, these exact nests.
We found a soft patch of grass and Ms. Perkins unpacked her cooler — hot coffee and homemade sugar cookies topped with chewy dulce de leche. All around us, hundreds of penguins waddled to and from the beach, stopping momentarily to examine the interlopers and occasionally break the silence with a squawk to a partner.
“This isn’t even where most of the penguins live,” Ms. Perkins said. “Sixty thousand of them live on an island.” Just off the coast of Bahia Bustamante, there are about a dozen small islands — what’s called Sea Lion Island, where 3,500 animals come to breed; Cormorants Island, which looks like a cloud of black and white feathers as you approach, as we did the next day — all of them part of the national park. But they are accessible only via Mr. Soriano’s property, which spans nearly 50 miles of coastline. So the only people who get to see these islands — full of shipwrecks, seabirds, penguins and, according to our hosts, a family of hares that ventured out there during an extremely low tide, got stuck and somehow, Darwin-style, adapted to drink salt water — are Mr. Soriano’s guests.
When Lisa and I got back to our house, there was a tiny lizard on the door, catching the last few moments of sunlight. Everything I knew told me that lizards and penguins should be living many lines of latitude apart. But there it was, a small part of an ecosystem that makes no sense but has worked perfectly for centuries: the ridiculous steamer ducks that can reach great speed but never fly, the giant petrels that swoop down from the sky moments after the sea lions give birth to feed on the placentas, the adorable penguin that was small enough that I could have smuggled it home inside my windbreaker.
We were leaving the next morning. It would take several bumpy hours in a Jeep, three flights, and two days to get home.
“You have to come back,” said Mr. Soriano over dinner that night. “You’re only seeing about half the animals right now. During the birthing season you can barely drive down the road, the animals are everywhere.”
For now, life at the bottom of the world is relatively untouched by humans. And though our visit wasn’t exactly peaceful, with the constant cacophony of squawks and bellows, it was about to get even noisier with the birthing season only weeks away. The baby penguins were coming.
Your Own Galápagos
To book a stay and organize airport transfer at Bahia Bustmante (bahiabustamante.com), contact Matias Soriano (54-11-5032-8677; [email protected]). Reservations are taken year round, but the property is open to visitors only from August to May.
Plan ahead — with so few rooms available, it’s best to book at least one month in advance. Rates are $215 (prices are given in U.S. dollars) per night including meals. Although there’s no minimum stay required, plan on staying for at least three to four days — anything less will feel very abbreviated.
To get there from Buenos Aires, fly to Comodoro Rivadavia or Trelew on Aerolineas Argentinas or LAN Airlines from the domestic airport in Buenos Aires (flights are about $300).
DANIELLE PERGAMENT is a frequent contributor to the Travel section.
Bahia Bustamante: Argentina’s Secret (and Private) Answer to the Galapagos
By DANIELLE PERGAMENT
THE first thing you notice is the scale of everything. The unending distance between towns, the unfathomable stretch of land between you and the horizon, the vast expanses of sky.
The next thing you notice is the landscape — or, more accurately, landscapes. In one spot, you’re surrounded by low, scrubby desert pocked with thorny bushes. And you think: this could be the Australian Outback, or maybe the American Southwest. But then you approach the ocean, the navy blue Atlantic with its frigid whitecaps and craggy coastline, and your mind calls up images of Nova Scotia or Ireland. Then from some point to the south: a flock of hot pink flamingos flies by, so close you could almost pet them. You picture South Florida, perhaps, or the Bahamas. But, in fact, you’re thousands of miles from any of those places.
This is Bahia Bustamante, a private sheep farm in Argentine Patagonia, sprawling over about 210,000 acres, owned by a soft-spoken man named Matias Soriano. Set right on the waters of the eastern coast, about 1,000 miles south of Buenos Aires, the farm is roughly the size of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Mr. Soriano, 41, welcomes up to 18 guests at a time, from September through May. Bahia attracts a certain kind of visitor — the kind who’s more traveler than tourist, who prefers roughing it to room service, who is happy to spend days kayaking, hiking, horseback riding or investigating Mr. Soriano’s private 65-million-year-old petrified forest — and then collapse with a scratchy lamb’s-wool blanket when the electricity shuts off at 11 p.m. But above all, it’s a place for people who will travel across continents to see a breathtaking combination of hundreds of disparate species, all converging on a single point on the map. Ultimately, that’s what drew me this far from home: I’d seen “Planet Earth,” I’d gone to the Bronx Zoo, I’d even come nose to nose with a hippo in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. But I’d never had breakfast with a penguin.
“Welcome to nowhere,” said Astrid Perkins, our 40-year-old rosy-cheeked guide (and Mr. Soriano’s girlfriend), as we pulled into what the staff members and farmhands who live here call “town” — whitewashed houses and a smattering of bright red picnic tables lining a rough dirt road along the beach. Half of these houses were built 60 years ago for the farmhands and their families; the other half (the ones a few steps from the beach) were added recently for guests, like my friend Lisa and me, who were visiting the edge of the world for a few days.
“Here’s the welcoming committee,” Ms. Perkins said, pointing over the hood of the Jeep. A few feet ahead, a dozen ostriches were walking toward us, curious but keeping a safe distance. They looked like a cast of ballerinas, their long necks craning above the car. Their prehistoric faces cocked slightly, examining us for a moment before they turned and glided away, the haughtiest of high school girls.
We drove on to our lodgings — a very comfortable, simply decorated house that would be our lodgings for the next week. (Rooms are $215 a night, including three home-cooked meals a day and all the malbec you can throw back.) All the guest rooms have a similar setup: two bedrooms, a neatly appointed living room, a modest kitchen and a porch a few feet from the South Atlantic.
Lisa and I dropped our bags and set out to explore. As soon as we started walking toward the water, we glimpsed a family of hares dash away, as two great egrets came in for a landing on the beach.
With such natural diversity, comparisons are inevitable to that other South America destination famous for its isolated and unique ecosystem — but for Mr. Soriano, the Galápagos, the Ecuadorean islands, aren’t a model, they’re a cautionary tale. The Galápagos receive more than 100,000 visitors a year, while Bahia Bustamante receives only about 400 annually. “The Galápagos are being destroyed by the traffic, and I won’t let that happen here,” he said. “We can accommodate 18 people at a time. That’s it.”
Mr. Soriano can keep things at that scale because it’s his land. Two years ago, the government turned the coastline and outlying islands into a national park, but the land is Mr. Soriano’s; he controls access to the ocean. And he’s quite happy to keep it that way.
“It’s been a family farm for over 50 years,” he said, scratching his woolly brown beard.
We were in the communal dining room, a cavernous hall lined with pictures of Bahia Bustamante in the 1950s. It looked exactly the same back then, only with horse-drawn carriages in place of Jeeps, and workmen in suspenders instead of baseball caps. We were sitting down to a lunch of spaghetti in tomato sauce and warm, garlicky bread.
For Mr. Soriano, protecting the eye-opening diversity of life here is an integral part of his business. “The government couldn’t protect the animals and the environment better than we are right now,” he said, “because we are controlling how many people come here.”
In few places in the world does such a variety of species exist in such proximity. First there are the domesticated animals — the sheep, dogs, cats and horses that roam freely over Mr. Soriano’s land. But traverse some of the hundreds of miles of roads that crisscross the pastures, fields, desert, dunes, beach and canyons that make up the property, and you might also see ostriches, foxes, armadillos and the majestic llama-like guanacos, wild cousins of the African camel.
You can watch Southern right whales breaching a few hundred feet off the beach and then see dolphins in the same spot the next morning. Sea lions surround themselves with their harems on the rocky shore, and sea elephants, with their trunklike faces, roll their blubbery bodies on the same sun-splashed rocks. Depending on the time of year, you might encounter more marine life: orcas, octopus, starfish, etc. (The “etc.” really is necessary.)
And then there are the birds. Bahia Bustamante is one of the Holy Grail destinations for ornithologists. There are hundreds of species: egrets, gulls, vultures, falcons, red knots, hawks, albatrosses, eagles, skuas, red plovers and several species that don’t exist anywhere else in the world. There are dozens of breeding grounds, including colonies of royal cormorants and rock cormorants. There are the giant petrels, which have six-foot wingspans and can fly 200 miles out to sea. And then there’s the steamer duck, which despite all physical evidence to the contrary, can’t take off and fly. I watched as they flapped their wings, got some momentum going — and for a second I thought, “maybe this time,” until they settled back down and quietly paddled away.
Although Bahia Bustamante isn’t an island, like the Galápagos or Madagascar, its isolated location means it essentially functions as one. “These animals have been left alone for generations without human intervention,” said Catherine Plume, a scientist with the World Wildlife Fund who has spent four years studying the species of southern South America. “And actually, they’re more closely related to animals from New Zealand and Australia than they are to other species in South America. When the continents broke off, these species were left here, blocked off by the ocean and the Andes.”
Bahia Bustamante has also been blessed with the sort of dramatic topography — points, capes, bays, all the pieces that make the coastline so jagged — that creates a safe place for animals to breed, according to Pablo Garcia Borboroglu, a biologist and researcher for the National Research Council of Argentina. Add to that the abundance of algae, seaweed and nutrient-rich water, he said, and you wind up with the perfect place for animals to live — or pass through, if you happen to be a right whale or a white-tufted grebe.
On our second evening, Lisa and I met up with our fellow guests — a conference of Patagonian sheep farmers, here to discuss sustainable and environmental methods of farming — in the dining room.
“It hasn’t changed much in half a century, and I plan to keep it that way,” said Mr. Soriano, pouring glasses of malbec from behind the bar. The room had turned dim and cozy, its huge windows overlooking the roiling Atlantic.
Mr. Soriano’s grandfather, Lorenzo Soriano, arrived on these shores in 1952 in search of seaweed. The young entrepreneur, who manufactured hair gel, needed it to make his products. Broke and desperate, the elder Mr. Soriano left his family behind in Buenos Aires to explore a place then known as Rotten Bay.
“When he got here, it was everything he dreamed,” the younger Mr. Soriano said with a laugh. “The shoreline was covered for miles with seaweed. Everyone thought he was crazy, but he saw the potential.” The rich find eventually led to what Mr. Soriano said was the world’s first seaweed farm, with 500 workers, houses for them and their families, a school for their children, and a thriving business. By 1968, the elder Mr. Soriano was doing so well he bought the two adjoining sheep farms, amassing a plot of over 200,000 acres.
Today, seaweed harvesting and sheep farming — not tourism — remain the primary sources of income for Bahia Bustamante. As far as Mr. Soriano is concerned, people who respect nature will always be welcome here — but the place is a farm first and foremost.
During our history lesson, dinner was served. Most of the food in Bahia Bustamante comes from within a mile of where we sat, including from the farm’s organic orchard and vegetable garden, which Ms. Perkins is expanding. All the flavors of our meals had the earthy taste of the land: warm lentil soup with hearty roasted vegetables; a green salad of bitter greens with sweet olive oil dressing; and platter upon platter of tender and salty fire-roasted lamb from animals that had been grazing outside only hours ago. We washed it all down with a few bottles of Patagonia beer. The place does have its high-end flourishes: the chef, who studied at the acclaimed Spanish restaurant El Bulli, also whipped up rich, creamy desserts each night to remind us of her provenance.
Since Bahia Bustamante doesn’t do any marketing of any kind — there’s a Web site, but the spot is not likely to be on a travel agency’s list, and you won’t be seeing a poster for it on a bus stop anytime soon — I was curious about how tourists ever found it. (I’d learned about it from Ms. Perkins, whom I’d met on a trip to Buenos Aires a few years ago.)
I asked Mr. Soriano how the farm had begun welcoming guests. “It was completely by accident,” Ms. Perkins answered for him. She tucked her curly blond hair behind her ears and continued, while Mr. Soriano looked on, amused. “Tell her about the German couple,” she said. “It was all because of a German couple.”
In 2005, two Germans, not realizing they were trespassing on private property, happened upon Bahia Bustamante and, at Mr. Soriano’s invitation, stayed for a few weeks. “They told some friends,” Mr. Soriano said. “We started getting requests, and soon enough, people were coming from all over to see the animals.”
The next morning at 6, Lisa and I were awakened by Ms. Perkins pounding at our door. We had a date with 50 sea lions and we were already running late. We drove to the far reaches of the peninsula, fluffy white sheep skittering out of the way as we passed, until we came to a colony of sea lions rolling, playing and barking at the surf. They seemed utterly unfazed by our presence.
By midday, we were back at the farm for a hearty bowl of vegetable stew; by early afternoon, we were ready to venture out again — this time by boat, to see a 100-year-old shipwreck. We returned by late afternoon, and promptly took a nap. No matter how hard Lisa and I tried to stay awake, every afternoon we’d collapse into a deep, immobile sleep — our hiking boots and fleece jackets still on, sunlight streaming through the windows. Exhaustion seemed unavoidable: you begin to live with the sense that you’re no match for the place. It’s huge and old and you are a mere fleck. Your brain just gets tired trying to comprehend it all.
(All of our trips were led by Mr. Soriano or Ms. Perkins, though they recently hired a guide. During our stay, Lisa and I were the only tourists, until the last day when we were joined by a quiet married couple from Japan and a loud Michigan woman named Dorothy and her silent preteen granddaughter. Once they arrived, we all took our outings as a group.)
By Day 3 — midway through our trip — time was taking on the same sense of expansiveness as the landscape. We measured outings in chunks of daylight, not minutes or hours. The day divided into mornings, afternoons and evenings.
It was one of our last mornings, and Ms. Perkins picked us up, again at 6 sharp. We were headed to what she called Penguin Island.
“We’re going to see some friends for breakfast,” she said, laughing. It was a blustery day, and our Jeep bumped along the coast, a handful of statuesque guanacos watching us from a rocky overhang. We drove on until we arrived at what appeared to be a muddy beach.
“The only time to come here is during low tide,” Ms. Perkins said as we walked across the flats, our boots making sucking sounds in the marsh. We followed our guide to a small patch of land that seemed to rise from the sea, a small hill composed of nothing but low, thorny bushes. Following Ms. Perkins’s lead, Lisa and I crouched down. And then, right there, not two feet in front of me, a little penguin stuck his head out from under one of the bushes. It looked me right in the eye for a moment, then, completely unperturbed, waddled past to the water. It was only then that I realized that 50 feet away at the shoreline, hundreds of the little guys were splashing in the water, diving for fish, bathing, playing with their friends. It was penguin heaven.
We walked into the bushes, slowly and quietly, as inconspicuous as three giants in bright windbreakers could be. Under almost every bush was a penguin nest; in each, two penguins rested on their egg, a portrait of monogamy (they mate for life), looking up as we passed, curious but not afraid. These were Magellanic penguins, each about two feet tall; they are indigenous only to southern Argentina, Chile and the Falkland Islands. (The penguins are classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as a near-threatened species because of oil spills and overfishing.) When the water gets too frigid, they’ll swim north to the warmer waters of Brazil for a few months before heading back next fall, to this exact island, these exact nests.
We found a soft patch of grass and Ms. Perkins unpacked her cooler — hot coffee and homemade sugar cookies topped with chewy dulce de leche. All around us, hundreds of penguins waddled to and from the beach, stopping momentarily to examine the interlopers and occasionally break the silence with a squawk to a partner.
“This isn’t even where most of the penguins live,” Ms. Perkins said. “Sixty thousand of them live on an island.” Just off the coast of Bahia Bustamante, there are about a dozen small islands — what’s called Sea Lion Island, where 3,500 animals come to breed; Cormorants Island, which looks like a cloud of black and white feathers as you approach, as we did the next day — all of them part of the national park. But they are accessible only via Mr. Soriano’s property, which spans nearly 50 miles of coastline. So the only people who get to see these islands — full of shipwrecks, seabirds, penguins and, according to our hosts, a family of hares that ventured out there during an extremely low tide, got stuck and somehow, Darwin-style, adapted to drink salt water — are Mr. Soriano’s guests.
When Lisa and I got back to our house, there was a tiny lizard on the door, catching the last few moments of sunlight. Everything I knew told me that lizards and penguins should be living many lines of latitude apart. But there it was, a small part of an ecosystem that makes no sense but has worked perfectly for centuries: the ridiculous steamer ducks that can reach great speed but never fly, the giant petrels that swoop down from the sky moments after the sea lions give birth to feed on the placentas, the adorable penguin that was small enough that I could have smuggled it home inside my windbreaker.
We were leaving the next morning. It would take several bumpy hours in a Jeep, three flights, and two days to get home.
“You have to come back,” said Mr. Soriano over dinner that night. “You’re only seeing about half the animals right now. During the birthing season you can barely drive down the road, the animals are everywhere.”
For now, life at the bottom of the world is relatively untouched by humans. And though our visit wasn’t exactly peaceful, with the constant cacophony of squawks and bellows, it was about to get even noisier with the birthing season only weeks away. The baby penguins were coming.
Your Own Galápagos
To book a stay and organize airport transfer at Bahia Bustmante (bahiabustamante.com), contact Matias Soriano (54-11-5032-8677; [email protected]). Reservations are taken year round, but the property is open to visitors only from August to May.
Plan ahead — with so few rooms available, it’s best to book at least one month in advance. Rates are $215 (prices are given in U.S. dollars) per night including meals. Although there’s no minimum stay required, plan on staying for at least three to four days — anything less will feel very abbreviated.
To get there from Buenos Aires, fly to Comodoro Rivadavia or Trelew on Aerolineas Argentinas or LAN Airlines from the domestic airport in Buenos Aires (flights are about $300).
DANIELLE PERGAMENT is a frequent contributor to the Travel section.
