Puerto Madryn, Argentina

Puerto Madryn, Argentina http://www.offexploring.com/lindsandsimon/blog/argentina/puerto-madryn Friday January 5th 2007

Hi... and Happy New Year! Things seem to have really picked up since we arrived in Buenos Aires for the first time way back when before Christmas... the Big City was fantastic, Iguazu Falls were spectacular, Christmas at Dos Talas was unforgettable and Patagonia will, I think, prove to be the cherry on the cake!

We arrived in Puerto Madryn and the land of Welsh names(!) last Saturday, spending a relatively quiet New Year's Eve in a nice restaurant on the sea front (with it left up to a Dutch family on the next table to get things going at midnight! Aren't the Dutch great?!!) Puerto Madryn is a lovely laid back town where the 'portenos' (residents of Buenos Aires) come to on holiday, but where the main attraction for real outsiders (like us!) is the nearby Península Valdés,

a huge piece of land taken over inland almost entirely by estancias and sheep farms, but the coast of which is famous for its spectacular wildlife – and loads of it! We hired a car for 5 days and drove the first day to Puerto Pirámides at the 'neck' of the peninsula. It was as though every Argentinian under thirty had arrived in this tiny place to camp and have barbecues for their few days off over new year! Yet none of them appeared to be inclined to go beyond it to see the animals! We found a corner in the campsite and attempted to cook rice without utensils and in a sandstorm, ultimately eating very gritty rice with a toothbrush! Lovely. I decided I couldn't stay there after all, and even Simon (usually far calmer and more tolerant!) didn't need persuading to take the tent down again and book instead into the little hostel, which was great. We ended up having a great afternoon visiting our first sea lion colony nearby and having a beer outside the hostel as the sun set. The next morning we set off early on our trip around the peninsula (about 240km). It was wonderful. It's all 'rutas de ripio' (gravel roads) and quite desolate, mainly very flat scrub, a few sheep every now and then... We also saw guanacos (wild relations of the llama), rheas (small ostriches), cavies (like rabbits with long legs!) and an armadillo! The colonies of marine wildlife on the coast were, however, incredible, and we could have stayed there for days just watching the sea lions, elephant seals and penguins.

We loved it. We were able to get really close, too, especially to the penguins. The area's been really well handled as a conservation zone, so the animals aren't threatened in any way, and because everyone else had stayed in Pta. Pirámides, we pretty much had 'miradors' (view points) and places to ourselves. It was really very lovely. We drove that night back to Puerto Madryn and then the next day south to Trelew, where everything becomes a little more Welsh. The whole area here is the 'Chubut Valley' and where the Welsh settled a few hundred years ago to escape English domination. It's really very remote

and dry and it was, by all accounts, a real achievement making it habitable. The Welsh Patagonians acknowledge the help of the native Treleuche Indians in their success, with various monuments round about... From Trelew we visited the villages of Gaiman and Donalvon with street names such as 'Juan Evans' and 'Miguel Jones'! Really funny! The villages were actually very quiet – we'd managed to hit siesta yet again! – but we enjoyed taking photographs of the bits of Welshness and found that the Ty Gwyn tearoom was open for tea, cakes and scones! Fab! We made the most and I ate all the cake on offer!!! We camped that night on the coast in Playa Unión, and set off again the next day, this time about 100km further south again to Punta Tombo and a huge penguin colony – of about half a million Magellanic penguins! It was well worth the long drive. This time we got even closer. They are fantastic animals, so funny-looking walking on land and so graceful and incredibly fast swimming in the sea. Again, they were completely unafraid of us...

Yesterday we drove all the way back here, to Puerto Madryn and camped unknowingly on the edge of a rave that deprived us of any sleep at all really, despite the woman at the entrance telling us we'd be in a quiet spot!? So we've felt tired today, but made the most nonetheless of having one more day with the car, and headed back towards the beginning of the peninsula where we'd earlier by-passed lovely, long El Doradillo beach... and enjoyed a few hours there this afternoon taking silly photographs and building sandcastles! Tomorrow night we take another overnight bus south to Río Gallegos, the end of the Argentine mainland and only another 16 hours or so from Tierra del Fuego... I can't wait. We're really enjoying this all now. Patagonia has always been one of those places to have conjured up images of the ultimate in wild, stunning scenery for me – a bigger and wilder Scotland and where I imagine myself in my absolute element. I am... We are so far... I've not yet had one regret about giving up work!

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