With time to kill, waiting for the last rental car in Punta Arenas, I walked to the water, stepping lightly past mongrels at a Purina warehouse, and I put my hand in the chilly Strait of Magellan - right there amid a bunch of floating plastic bags and candy wrappers. The warehouses were better looking than the dirty shore.

A thousand sheep blocked the road outside Torres del Payne park. Two gauchos and a squad of dogs marched them forward. The dogs ran and darted, responding to the gauchos’ whistles, and moved the sheep off the road for us. They, and we, were bound for a place called Estancia Domingo (Domingo’s ranch). You can see it in the distance.

The dogs do their thing. Mirja pointed out they weren’t sheepdogs, but mutts, or “cocktail dogs” as she put it, and observed that you wouldn’t need to play with these dogs at night because they’d be worn out.

Guanaco on mountainside near Torres del Payne. They’re maybe four feet tall at the shoulders, llama-like, brown and white, from the camel family. They may weigh 200 pounds. They live in family groups, and we usually saw them with their kids. They’d do this funky juke with their long necks when they ran.

The Torres del Payne.

A long sand spit stretched outside our window at the Hosteria Lago Gray, just in front of the lake. Icebergs floated near shore, not quite building sized, but several people tall.

Baby bergs outside Hosteria Lago Gray.

The nearly domestic fox. The chef threw meat out there and the fox warily came within feet to grab it. The chef whistled for that fox like for a dog.

"We set out over a suspension bridge (“2 max at a time”) and along the edge of Lago Gray to see the icebergs, bluer by degrees than the water, then up to Mirador (lookout) Ferrier - a vertical rise of just 300 meters, but as steep and tough as we wanted."

Oh, and was it windy up there! Mirja and I couldn’t remember a windier place. Every night about five or six, it kicked up a gale and bore down, and rattled the windows and whistled through the grass.

"Gales blew hard across barren rock at the top, with views back west to another snowy peak, and up into Lago Pingo and the glacier at its north end, closer to the Patagonian ice cap." Here's pack ice calved from the glacier at the top.

Those little dots are people down there along the shoreline.

Salto Grande, where chalky water rushed from Lago Nordenskjöld into Lago Pehoe. Nice of the man on the rock in the center to provide perspective.

Torres del Payne park, Chile.