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Well - i've now rewritten the Montevideo bit to include Colonia and corrected Dolores....
A website you might find interesting is www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook - it has top-line information on every country and is frequently updated.
You might also like to know that there are branches of HSBC and Santander banks throughout Brazil, Argentina & Uruguay - Santander own Abbey National; Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester in case you're wondering - so getting money out here & keeping track of your account & spending ought to be easy........
Anyway - Patagonia! I am in Patagonia - home to the Welsh! The city of Gaiman has 4 Welsh choirs - and no, i'm not making this up.... - the first Welsh settlers arrived in what is now Puerto Madryn on 28th July 1865 - simply looking for a new life....
Patagonia seems to have got its name either from the apparently overly-large feet of the native Indians - an illusion caused by them insulating their moccasins by stuffing them with grass or from Gran Patagon - a character from Greek mythology...
The landscape here is flat - not as Fen-flat as the Pampas - and is mostly semi arid scrub as opposed to lush pastures as in the Pampas.
I flew from Buenos Aires to Trelew - now Trelew is one of those places where you'll never get the pronounciation right - it is roughly "tru" as in "trust" and then "lieu" - but most of the time what you say comes out as "i ate your granny's shoes for lunch" - so you just get blank incomprehension - on the rare occasions when someone recognises what you've said you get a horrified "but you're not staying there are you?" followed rather disconcertingly by "y papas fritas?" - how do Papa's fritas come in to this?
The one hour flight took almost 2 hours because - of course - there's a time difference. Oops! Patagonia is 1 hour behind Buenos Aires - so i think i'm now 4 hours behind the UK. I am actually staying in the sea side town of Puerto Madryn - which has become a tourist centre and has a major aluminium smelting plant (Aluar) - the bauxite comes from Brazil by ship (obviously) and the power comes from a hydro-electric plant some 90km away in the Andes. In case you're wondering, the aluminium plant is not why the tourists come - no siree-Bob! The tourists come to visit the Peninsula Valdes.
From Puerto Madryn you drive for about 80k and cross the Ameghino Isthmus to enter the peninsula - which is a reserve of sorts and mostly barren scrub divided into Estancias - the biggest being 100,000 hectares (good grief) - they raise sheep out here (mostly Morenos, sheep fans) and each sheep apparently needs 4 hectares of scrub to sustain it. They are in competition with the much more graceful Guanaco (a member of the Llama / Alpaca / Vicuna family).....
Tourists head for the coast to see sea lions and elephant seals. Want to know how you can tell a seal from a sea lion? Well, sea lions can walk on their flippers (seals can't); sea lions have external ears - albeit very small ones (seals have internal ears) and sea lions live by the sea and go out each day to catch fish while seals - or at least the elephant seals here - can spend up to 7 months at sea - can dive to 1500 metres and stay under water for 2 hours at a time. Even though seals have lungs very much like ours, they have a technique of oxygenating their blood that allows them to stay under water for long periods. Just don't ask me about Walruses - if i see any i'll let you know. But i have to admit it hadn't occurred to me that these were three very different (albeit similar looking) species - i didn't come here to have my ignorance thrown in my face but hey.... - travel'n'learn :-))
At Punta Norte on the Estancia San Lorenzo - where we had a very nice lunch - i couldn't eat all the lamb, though - luckily my guide was hungry & did justice to the amount of lamb cooked! - anyway, there is a colony of around 100,000 breeding pairs of Magellan Penguins. We were allowed into the sanctuary and walked amongst the Penguins - so sweet! Most of them just stood & stared up at us - cocking their heads to one side and then the other as if they were trying to make out what we were.
We sat close to the shore where a long line of penguins were gathered - just standing - chatting, i assume - the line stretched at least a kilometre in either direction - just an astonishing number - anyway, some penguins were obviously swimming - then a couple of sea lions appeared and there was a mass exodus of penguins from the sea (even though sea lions don't eat penguins) and the penguins walked quickly away from the sea up the beach a metre or so - except of course, the ones near us just stood in front of us, looking up and glaring - you could feel them thinking "get away from the sea, fool!"......
In the meantime - unbeknown to the penguins, we'd been tracking the progress of - yes - two killer whales - they were swimming close to shore and broke the surface a few times in front of us - a male and a female - funnily they seemed to have missed the two sea lions and didn't grab any penguins - but gosh it was exciting (and very lucky) to see them....
Watching the Stormy Petrels was interesting, too - very big birds that can fly very low, skimming the surface of the sea - not averse to eating penguins, either :-/
We also saw on the peninsula some vultures; Lesser Rhea (Choique); Stormy Petrels; Oyster catchers (a bit late, most of the oysters are fossilised); grey foxes; a hare (no Mara around yesterday) and a hairy Armadillo - so a pretty good day all round for wild life, i reckon.
I stayed at the Hotel Bahia Nueva - right on the sea front - highly recommended - very friendly. My trip locally was orgainsed through Argentina Vision - www.argentinavision.com - again, if you travel to Patagonia then i'd be happy to recommend them....
Later today i go down to Ushaia on the Tierra Del Fuego - to see glaciers & the Beagle Channel. I might not get a chance to write that up until i get to Calafate- so do expect some more incompetence on the timing & order front, won't you?
Joy!
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