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Hola Amigos,
After another epic bus ride (the longest so far at 28 hours) we arrived in Puerto Madryn. Everyone hears about Patagonia and how fantastic it is but what you don't realise is between the beautiful mountians and the haunting, rugged coastline there is nothing. Absoultely nothing, less then the Nullabore Plain kinda nothing. It is mesmerising and completely boring at the same time and does not make for an interesting bus trip.
There are a number of things to do do in the area so we were quite excited to be arriving. The town itself is situated on a large bay on the edge of a UNESCO World Heritage Area. In season there place is packed with southern right whales, sealions and elephant seals, orcas (yes the one that you see in documentarys taking seal pups from the beaches) and the largest colony of penguins outside Antarctia. Near by there are some interesting towns originally settled by the Welsh, and the area is also covered in fossils of everything from huge dinosaurs, extinct penguins, whales, sharks and heaps of weird mammals and other sea creatures.
We decided to hire a car for 2 days so we could fit everything in and do it on the cheap and in our own time. We headed off on the first day to Trelew, a town about an hour away that had a great dinosaur museum, Damien's first I think. It was great, well set out with heaps of fossils and very interesting. From there we learned that in a near by welsh town you could walk through a reserve looked after by the museum where they stil are finding bones, so off we went. Damien was determined to find a fossil sharks tooth (a budding palaeontologist!!), and after about an hour on a hill he picked up a sharks tooth, something elses tooth and a few random bones. Of coures you weren't supposed to take any samples but we had a few decoys to give to the ranger which turned out to be the jaw bones of some massive extinct manta-ray, so we got away with it, and hence the reason we don't know what the other fossils are. We then headed back to town for all-you-can-eat tea and cakes at a welsh tea house, which turned out to be a massive rip-off. We would have had to eat a tonne to get our moneys worth, we are living and learning the hard way.
From here we drove back to Puerto Madryn and onto the Peninsular Valdes (check it out on google earth if you can it is pretty cool) where we planned to stay the night in our tiny tiny car. The main reason for this was we were trying to get into the park when it was closed so we didn't have to pay the entrance fee: standard backpackers operating procedure. We didn't take into account the small town in the park which ment that the toll booths were open all night sigh! We found a place to 'camp' for the night on a cliff overlooking the northern bay just as the wind whipped up and almost blew our little red car off! well it felt like it anyway.
A quick summary of the next day and a half goes like this: We drove into the national park after dark along the worst road ever!!! in order to aviod paying the park fees, but because of the town on the peninsular, we didn't realise it would be open 24hrs and had to cough up the 90 pesos for our troubles anyway. We drove around the park in the dark for another hour in our tiny red car looking for somewhere to 'camp' and ended on a cliff top overlooking the northern bay which was lovely, the wind that almost blew us off however, was not.
We woke up the next morning to a lovely sunrise and could see flamingoes below us walking around on the beach, so down we went to check them out. We snuck along trying to get close but they kept walking away so Damien ran off through the bushes in order to push them back down towards me so I could get some good close ups. HA! Unfortunately his idea of slowly hearding them towards me involved him jumping out suddenly from behind a bush. The photos will show you what happened next if you can't work it out for yourself.
We spent the rest of the day driving around the peninsular on some of the worst roads ever looking for wildlife. We found out that the orcas come in close at high tide so hightailed it to the northern most point on the peninsular where they are most often sighted. There were none :-( only a few enormous elephant seals and some sealions. By this time so much dust had gotten into the car that we couldn't open our doors from the outsides and had to leave the windows down so we could get back in.
We drove to a few other spots with the same result, nothing except the aramadillo which didn't wanna stick around for a photo either. We did however collect alot of dust. Dust, dust anyone.....
The landscape was very stark, the coast beautiful but we didn't really enjoy ourselves, I guess we were hoping for a bit of seal carnage at the hands, well mouths of some ferocious hungry orcas. The national park was a bit of a joke as well. While our access was limited to a few locations and they kept wafting on about the UNESCO World Heritage Site, the peninsular was actually covereed in huge estancias (privately owned sheep and cattle stations) and there were sheep, cattle, horses and gauchos (the cowboys) roaming all over the place, so much for preservation.
On the plus side, back in Puerto Madryn I discovered a shop selling icecream very cheaply by the kilo and returned several times. Just for quality control purposes you undrestand, they have have been having issues with the chocolate flavor especially, so I was just helping out. Ha! I was a regular by the end of our week there, was practically on a first name basis with all the staff.
It was also here that we ran into Pete again. He is goig to travel with us for another week or two as we are all heading in the same direction.
We hired bike for a day and went cycling out to another sealion colony about 15kms out of town, unfortunately there were no hungry orcas here either, just sealions and a funny sign about how to recognise rock shags... On the way home we decided to take a short cut through the bushes which should have reduced our trip by at least 5kms. What looked like track quickly turned to sand traps and the cute little shrubs had spikes and thorns as long as my pinky! Not so fun.
All in all this leg of our trip was not a raging sucess, and so without much sadness we leave the sea and head inland again to Barioloche, a beautiful town in the heart of the Lakes District. Argentina's chocolate and icecream capitol. Things are looking up!
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