Fun House
We decided to visit a few museums while in Punta Arenas, a naval museum and a museum of natural history/culture.
The naval museum was kind of cool. The main floor held lots of little model boats, even a model of “the Beagle”, which was the ship that Charles Darwin was a passenger of when he was exploring this area. Yeah, that was ok, but really, they were just toy boats. Upstairs however, they had turned a room into the inside of a ship. Sean was pretty excited about this part of it.
Then we headed to the natural history museum. We couldn’t take any pictures in here, and this is terribly unfortunate. The first floor of this museum contained animals and plants from the region, that were either stuffed, pickled or pinned. I not sure which of these was worst. The pinning involved various bugs, and I am happy to report that we are now back in the land of “ordinary” sized bugs. Unfortunately, they were also quite dull, just like back at home. No beautiful blue morpho butterflies. I will never understand why people display things pickled in jars. You can never really see them and they just stink, so let’s move on to the stuffed specimens. When I was an undergrad in zoology, we had a lab on taxidermy. We were all given a dead animal, mostly mice and voles, and were told to “stuff it”, so it looks like the original creature. Now, not to gross all you non-biology types out, but basically what you do when you stuff a creature is make a hole in the skin, peel the skin away from the bones and muscles, then recreate the shape of the beasty in wire (or cotton or a mixture of the two) and then rewrap the skin around your “model” and sew up the skin. Sounds easy. Unfortunately it is terribly difficult. Our class managed to create the most horrific creatures you can ever imagine. We had mice that were 8 inches long and only 1/2 and inch thick, mice that were wider than they were long,mice with only 3 legs, and mice whose heads were larger than their bodies. Since that class, I have always appreciated stuffed creatures that LOOK like the original creature. It is truly an art! There was no art in this museum. It was like a bad flashback to that zoology lab many, many years ago. These animals were so bad, even the kids noticed and they were running from one animal to the next, commenting on the extra long necks, super long bodies, etc. Poor creatures. I felt like I was looking at the animals through the bent mirrors at the carnival funhouse. On top of the deformation problems, it looked like the museum may have had an insect problem as well. Many animals were missing fur or feathers in large patches. How sad!
This morning, we left Punta Arenas and tonight we are in Puerto Natales. Puerto Natales is located in the Sound of Last Hope and is the closest town (of any size), to the Torres de Paine National Park. Usually the Torres are the mountains you see on all the Patagonia posters. We are “this” close to “real” mountains. We could see the mountains getting closer as we drove.
And now, we can see them across the sound.
Beautiful!! We are not sure if Mungo is allowed in the park on not, so we will likely spend tomorrow finding out this and hopefully a few other details. We are hoping to do a little hiking in the park if all goes well. Maybe even an overnight trip. Keep your fingers crossed.