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Donna & Neils Travels
OK, so after the excitement of Iguazu we had to plan our route down the to Atlantic Coast to Puerto Madryn where we are now. The route chosen was as follows;
POSADAS
This was our first port of call and all we can say first of all was that it was HOT, HOT HOT!!!!. We managed to get a place in the centre of town which was really cheap, and after 2 nights of the noise of the lift keeping us awake, we realised why, only joking wasn't too bad. There wasn't a lot to do in Posadas itself but it was a pretty, quiet town and we had a good time walking around and just being there. From here we visited the Jesuit missions in San Ignacu, which was about an hours bus ride north. Must admit, although we were glad we saw them wouldn't say that they were a must on someones agenda, which most of the travel books seemed to say, maybe we are just cultural heathens who don't really appreciate religious old run down buildings.
BUENOS ARIES
Made this a break point in our journey from Posadas to the Atlantic Coast, even though we've been here before. Not going to say a lot except that we both realised what a beautiful city this really is second time around.
MONTE HERMOSO
After our 2 day stopover in BA we decided to head for a beach resort further south to catch some rays. We opted for a quiet place rather than a touristy place that would be packed, yeah we know its boring but there you go.
The hotel we booked into was owned by a youngish local called Valentine, he was really friendly and spoke pretty good american/english and seemed happy to have 2 brits to practice his English on and he helped us with our Spanish. The town itself, although quiet, was very mush like Blackpool/Southend but not as big. This surprised us but it was nice to see that the working class Argentinians weren't too dissimilar to us good old working class brits, a bit of sun, s*** fair, and lots of tourist seaside shops selling tat, well you just can't beat it sometimes.
Well, having mentioned the sun, its funny but we didn't see any, it was pissing it down with a Gale force 9 just to make us really feel at home. We decided to leave after a day, which was a shame as we think we would have enjoyed it here, and went to the main city 100km to the west.
BAHIA BLANCA
Another small city with plaza's(see main postcard photo), again pretty and clean but the main reason we came here was that there were a load of hills to the north that had good trekking and good views. After 2 days of trying to call agencies and visiting Tourist agencies and not getting any joy we gave up, decided if fate didn't want us to go there then we wouldn't.
EL CONDOR
This was A REALLY QUIET beach town next to a city called Viedma. There must of only been about 300 - 400 buildings with a beach the size of Africa. There was one Hotel and a 'residential', which is like a cheap hotel. We went for the cheap option and found that the owner was the spitting image of Norman Bates, although he was really nice we both still had to stand guard whilst the other had a shower.
El Condor was beautiful, we spent about 4 days here lying on the beach, trying to find the sea (the sea goes out further than Weston Super Mare but you don't have to trudge through 3 foot of s***ty mud to find it) and looking for the elusive parrot colony. Apparently, although El Condor is small its famous for having the biggest colony of cliff burrowing parrots in the world, 35,000 of them along 10km's of cliffs. Impressive huh, well would be if the b******s hadn't flown the nest 2 weeks before we arrived. It was still nice to walk along the cliffs though, looking down on tiny but pretty El Condor.
VIEDMA
We didn't mean to visit Viedma but we had to get the coach here to get to Puerto Madryn. It was going to be easy, leave El Condor at 8am, get to Viedma at 9am and then catch the 10am coach to Puerto Madryn. Well it would have been but Neil got the bus tickets for the 10am coach the next day. Therefore, we stayed the night in Viedma and actually had a really nice day boating down the river.
PUERTO MADRYN
We were really looking forward to coming here as it has a large array of marine wildlife, within the city and around(especially a place called Peninsula Valdes), and we weren't dissappointed. We went on a 12 hour tour of the Peninsula which took in seeing Southern Seals, Penguin Colonies, Elephant Seals, and we very briefly saw the tip of a killer whales fin out at sea. It was an amazing day, seeing so many different species of wildlife and the views from the clifftops looking over the Atlantic were pretty special as well.
Puerto Madryn and the towns around are famous for their Welsh ancestory, a load of Taffy's came over about 100 years ago, reckon they were trying to invade Ireland and got lost.
We are off to some of the Welsh towns tomorrow, to have some tea and cake. Then we'll be off further south to head on towards the southern most city in the world, which we can't spell at the moment.
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