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Lets face it, Puerto Madryn is a s***hole, and people only go there for only thing, and it isn't in the town, its in the bloody sea. We arrived at about 8 in the morning after a hellish bus ride, found the town completely deserted and covered in a cloud of dust which made finding our hostel pretty hard. The surrounding area, and pretty much all of the east side of Argentina is just desert, you can drive for 20 hours and still see the same flat, rubbish strewn scrubland with the only excitement being when little tornadoes pick up more dust to throw in your face.
Anyway, the hostel was crap,(ironically named 'Don't Worry, Be Happy', with angry notices all over the place "… guest are not allowed to use facilities after the strict 10am check out" blah blah), so we quickly booked our whale watching boat and got our bus tickets for the day after.
The whale watching is off the coast of a village called Punta Piramades on the Peninsula Valdez. The sea was really rough and the captain thought it would be hilarious to drive straight into the waves to get us all soaked. I've never been sea-sick in my life but I was ready to puke all over the girl in the designer jacket next to me. The boat was packed with tourists covering in various photographic equipment who 'wow-ed' when we saw the first whale and screamed when they got wet and 'ahh-ed' when the calf turned up. The whales were pretty cool but we obviously didn't get the best day for it. We saw a mother feeding her calf and a few smaller ones but not much else. We went to see some elephant seals that kind of looked like giant slugs that could have been dead for all we could see (especially me, I couldn't clean my glasses properly after the boat so everything was slightly sluggy looking). Also saw Magellenic penguins, but couldn't wait to get off the bus and out of Puerto Madryn.. Unfortunately we had one more night then a 6 hour wait until our bus left, so we wandered around the town (which inexplicably closed, like, every shop at about 11am for three hours).
On my list of "I wish I had my camera" moments is what we saw while having lunch in Puerto Madryn. We heard some barking outside then 2 minutes later this car came speeding down the road at about 40mph with a huge Alsatian dog on the roof, standing up, being chased by an equally massive Rottweiller right in the middle of the road. I just said to Nick "Nick, a dog on a roof, a dog on a roof, look", he just looked at me weird. They were barking at each other like crazy so they guy in the car must have known it was there and just ignored it. They only stopped after the Rotty nearly got run over by a truck at the crossroads. That was our excitement for the day anyway.
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