Today we visited Ainsworth Bay where we went on a forest walk and in the afternoon we visited Gallegos Glacier.
There are screens on the ship that give the daily schedule. They are in multiple languages- English, Spanish, French. Folks are divided into groups for excursions. The excursion groups are also grouped by language.
Each excursion is rated on
- Pace- how fast you’ll walk- the longer the distance the faster the pace as all excursions have the same amount of time ashore
- Mud- how much mud you’ll have to walk thru
- Slope- how steep the slope is
- Physical Activity
- Educational Content- this happens to be inversely proportional to the pace- the faster the pace, the less educational content
The forest excursion we went on was rated ‘low physical demand’ but it had a large educational content. It was so amazing to see the forest with it’s tall green trees, lots of beautiful lichen and mosses with a mountains and glaciers in the background.
We saw a fox just on the beach as we were getting ready for our walk so that was exciting.
We saw the landscape that was changed by the introduced beavers. They have created a whole new eco system with ponds instead of streams.
It was exciting to see our first large glacier of the trip. We heard the cracks from the glacier and saw a couple of smaller calving events. We felt like we were right at the glacier but learned when we came back aboard that we were 2 kilometers away.
As we were leaving, I saw two V-shaped wakes in the water that were moving quite fast. I couldn’t figure out what was making those tracks but found out later they were Flightless Steamer Ducks. These ducks flap their short, stubby wings and paddle with their webbed feet and can get up to 24km/hour as they motor across the surface of the water
