6 Continents, 5 Months

Today we got up nice and early at 5:30 (3:30am, Alberta) to catch a tour boat that was touring some islands about a 45 minute boat ride West of Pica. We heard the islands were inhabited by sea lions so we wanted to see some for ourselves. When we got the islands, there was probably 250,000 birds flying around and sitting on the rocks! It smelt very strongly of guano (bird crap, used for fertilizer). While we were looking, our tour guide pointed out penguins! I never thought I'd ever see penguins in the wild until today. I thought they only lived on the South Pole. There was also lots of sea lions so nobody was disappointed. After all that commotion, we drove for about half an hour to the sand dunes. We jumped in a nine seating dune buggy, even though there is six in my family, there was the driver provided by the buggy place and then our driver, Rosa and our awesome tour guide that we also had on the first day, Fabrizio. I wasn't sure how high or how many dunes there was going to be but when we got up past the first dune, there was sand for as far as you could see. It was so cool and so much fun. We got to a high dune and our driver let us out and gave us boards that looked like snowboards but were smaller and didn't have bindings, just velcro. I was the only one the successfully made it down in a snowboard style, everyone else didn't make it or just didn't try. It was all going good until my mom was going and she fell and her head was bleeding. Fabrizio, being the doctor he is, thought the clinic wanted to much money so he just went in a bought the stitch things needed and stitched her up himself. He has studied four years in dentistry so I was confident. So today, for the most part, we escaped without injury, saw a few penguins right by the equator and had a great day!