Chris´ turn to write this time...OK, this one could be a bit of a monster as we´ve done quite a lot in the last week. It feels like we´ve spent most of it on a bus and my poor knees are starting to complain. South Americans are just too short! (Sarah - and we haven´t even got to the countries where the South Americans are really short yet!)
First stop after Bariloche was Puerto Madryn which is the place the Welsh first landed when they came across here in 1865. Puerto Madryn had the feel of a seaside resort out of season which is essentially what it is. We took an overnight bus from Bariloche on Monday so arrived here early on Tuesday morning. After finding a cheap hotel to stay in and talking to the Polish guy at the tourist information office (who had been to Swansea and thus earned his mention here) we set out to book a tour to see the whales in Golfo Nuevo, the reason for our visit. This accomplished, we walked along the full sweep of the bay to the Ecocentro which is a kind of whale museum. On the way we passed the original settlements of the Welsh when they got here which were basically caves carved into the rocks on the beach. They are officially the first buildings in Puerto Madryn though! There was also a monument listing the names of the first colonists and not surprisingly there were a lot of Williams´, Jones´and Davies´.
Further round the headland we found the Ecocentro. They had a big skeleton of a killer whale outside (Sarah - did you know they have fingers in their flippers???) and more inside. Although all the displays are in Spanish we were given booklets with everything in English which made life a little easier. The place is really interesting and they had a room that you caould go into and listen to whales talking which was really eerie particularly when it was loud and high pitched. They´ve got a live sea tank thing with crabs, starfish and other sea creatures in and a really cool reading room cum view tower which is very relaxing with very comfy seats and Sarah managed to fall asleep to prove the point! (Sarah - it was quite expensive really but it really was a nice place - such a laidback, relaxed atmosphere (and the tower was really warm too, hence falling asleep...))
The next day, Wednesday, we were picked up at 7:15 from our hotel to go on our excursion to Peninsula Valdes. The day had an interesting start as the door to the hotel was locked and the guy from the hotel was nowhere to be seen. We searched high and low, tried all the keys we could find and knocked on the door to his room but all to no avail. I was thinking about climbing out the window when Sarah leaned out and rang the door bell and this raised him in his pjs to come and let us out! (Sarah - just in time luckily as the minibus pulled up about 2 minutes after we got outside!)
The minibus ride out to Peninsula Valdes wasn´t too exciting (Sarah - very flat, dry landscape) although we did see a few guanacos by the road side (part of the llama family) which look quite bizarre and cute at the same time. We passed along the stretch of road where it is possible to see Golfo San Jose on the left (north) and Golfo Nuevo on the right (south) when on the isthmus leading to the peninsula. These two gulfs have their high tides 6 hours apart and the Argentinians were thinking about building a tunnel between the two to generate electricity in the 70s but the project was scrapped on the grounds of the damage it would do to the wildlife of the area. We took the boat out to the whales from Puerto Piramides.
Straight away we managed to find three whales rolling around in the sea, waving flippers and finally showing their tails before diving into the depths. Its really cool being able to get so close to them and they are very big at that range. After they disappeared we could see a whale beaching off in the distance (standing up in the water) but we soon found more. The whales have now mated and the males have left the mums with the babies, we saw a white baby which there is a 1 in 100 chance of seeing and came across a baby on its own who was waiting for its Mum who had dived below. The boat got really close to this one, right by our seats as luck would have it, and we could almost reach out and touch it. We saw a few others as well although my favourite part was when we stopped by a couple of whales and cut the engines and you could hear them talking to each other - very cool! I think both Sarah and I could have happily stayed out there all afternoon but after an hour and a half we headed back into port. (Sarah - definitely! It was a great experience and the whales just seem so serene. Interestingly, not everybody seemed to think so...one conversation I heard between an American couple went as follows...Girl - "I can see what (Bob) meant about a whale being a whale being a whale." Bloke - "Yeah, I mean, it´s not like they do tricks or anything." I mean - honestly, what do people expect????? Also (my turn for saying something stupid probably), I didn´t actually realise that you could hear whales without any special equipment or anything - that was especially surreal and very cool.)
The rest of the trip was spent visiting different parts of Peninsula Valdes to see different animals. We saw a small colony of magellan penguins (Sarah - quite small ones - about 45cm high but very cute) and some elephant seals basking on a beach (Sarah - not quite so small - although we only saw babies and ´teenagers´, you still wouldn´t want one on top of you!). We went to another place where there were supposed to be sea lions but as it was low tide (Sarah - and not quite the season, although it is still possible to see them sometimes apparently), there were only more elephant seals. We did see some armadillos here though which were really funny and helped themselves to some old guy´s tea.
On Thursday we caught the bus to Trelew which is more of a commercial town. Its another Welsh settlement as the name suggests (Town of Lewis) and is the closest place to go and see the penguins from. First impressions of the place weren´t great though as we wandered into the town centre looking for tourist information and found some kind of demonstration going on and around the corner the road blocked by riot police wearing helmets, gas masks and carrying shields. Luckily it didn´t kick off and we managed to find a nice and cheap hotel to stay in. Sarah wasn´t totally enamoured with the place though and set about madly organising our trips so that we only had to stay one night. (Sarah - I don´t expect 5 star hotels or anything but most people have wardrobes bigger than the bathroom and it was just a bit of a depressing room...) We set off for Gaiman straight away - a Welsh village about 20 minutes away by bus. It was a really pretty little place and first of all we went for a Welsh tea to see what it would involve. The place we had it was lovely and the tea itself was great - a big pot of tea, some bread and butter, two lots of jam, scones and ten pieces of cake! I don´t like tea but had to drink it after I mistakenly ordered it. I only realised later that they speak Welsh there so had I done so sooner I would have had no problems ordering! The cake was great although at 18 pesos each, the authentic welsh experience was quite expensive. (Sarah - not sure about the authentic part - I´ve never had a tea like that in Wales...apart from at Chris´ house maybe :0) ) They had a male voice choir playing and lots of dragons and welsh ladies and maps of Wales around the place and a ticking clock; it was all a bit much for Sarah who got a bit tearful from homesickness - awww! (Sarah - it´s really stupid the things that remind you of home and things you miss!)
After tea we decided we needed a walk to work off some of the cake so took a taxi out to Bryn Gwyn Paleontological Park. It´s an old archaelogical site where they have found fossils dating back millions of years. It earned its name (white hill) because the ground has been bleached by the sun - the place is a dried out river valley. The walk (about 2km up a (Sarah - very big) hill) is really cool as you work your way forwards in time with different fossils they have discovered at specific points. They had a dolphin, shark and an impressive armadillo amongst others. The views from the top which is 125m high are really impressive although it was very windy and we were also against the clock as we had our taxi coming back to pick us up. (Sarah - really enjoyed this as not only were the fossils really interesting, the landscape was also very strange - it felt a bit like being on the set of one of the planets from Star Wars or something!) Chris - Tatooine.
Friday we took an excursion to Punta Tombo where there are 500,000 nesting penguins. As we´d opted for just the trip to Punto Tombo and not all the frills that go with the normal tours we got a glorified taxi driver taking us and two French guys down there. The drive down was interesting as part of the road gets quite bad at one point. They´ve laid a gravel road but this is a bit of a nightmare to drive on and must do lots of damage to the car by the sound of it so our driver resorted to driving down the grass verge going down the outside of the road signs! (Sarah - part of the road at one point??? It was about a 110km trip and about 50km of that was down the gravel road! I don´t quite understand why the government/ministry of transport/road builders make roads like it as they obviously don´t think they´re a great idea as we saw a sign saying ´gravel roads are dangerous´ and a tractor with a big shovel type thing on the front shoveling the layer of stones away - very strange...but another road travel story for us so that´s good!)
We got to spend two hours with the penguins which was really good fun. You´re allowed to wander around through the nesting areas and virtually touch them and they don´t seem to mind too much as long as you don´t go near their babies. Its amazing the number of them walking around. We saw some little baby penguins too although they´d only just been born so were still in the nest being protected by Mum (Sarah - or Dad. The parents take turns in looking after the eggs and the babies). The funniest parts were watching them going down to the sea to fetch dinner and bring it back. Its quite a long walk for them (about an hour) and on one of the routes there were quite a lot of slippery rocks which meant they kept falling over and had trouble getting back on their feet! (Sarah - just watching them walk around made me laugh - the way they waddle around looking so proud just looks so sweet!!! They also seemed to have some problems when they were trying to get out of the water, almost as if they couldn´t find their land legs. They would come in swimming on their fronts, get their feet down, try to stand up, get about half way and then fall forwards again...)
So that was Trelew, we managed to stay only one night (Sarah - mission accomplished! Although, having said that, I actually got over my room horror after a couple of hours and although you virtually had to stand in the toilet to have a shower, it was quite a nice shower) (Chris - quite handy if you wanted to do both at the same time) and caught the overnight bus to Rio Gallegos on Friday evening. We wanted to go to El Calafate but the only way to get there from Trelew was to go via Rio Gallegos. This journey was an experience in itself as at 12:30 we were supposed to change seats on the bus although we´d been assured the bus was direct and there were no changes. At about midnight the bus pulled into a station and got everyone off the bus, they unloaded all the luggage, cleaned the bus, then everyone got back on, into their new seats and we left at 12:30! At Trelew bus stations we´d met a Scottish guy called Tom and an Israeli guy who been travelling in South America for 14 months and the Israeli guy´s advice was don´t ask why, just accept it.
As soon as we got to Rio Gallegos we bought tickets on the first bus to El Calafate, only popping into the centre briefly to try and book accommodation in El Calafate (unsuccessfully) and to call John (Sarah´s stepdad) to wish him happy birthday. Although it looked like a nice enough place there wasn´t very much of interest there.
We arrived in El Calafate Saturday at 7.30 in the evening. El Calafate is one of the most popular tourist centres in Argentina and as a result the accommodation and the food is very pricey. We managed to find a nice hospedaje that wasn´t too expensive though and booked ourselves in to go and see the Perito Moreno Glacier. (Sarah - apparently, El Calafate is in the same equivalent place in the southern hemisphere as London is in the northern hemisphere...I thought that was quite interesting!)
Our minibus picked us up at 8:30 on Sunday morning for our trip to the glacier, with our friendly driver & guide, Pablo, pointing out various points of interest along the way to the park. We stopped just after the entrance to the park for toilets and a quick talk about how the glacier grows to block off one half of the lake from the other. The pressure builds up against this dam and shatters spectacularly. This used to happen every 6 or 7 years but the last time it had happened was 1988 until it did it again this year. As we were walking to the toilet I heard a trip and a thud and somehow Sarah had managed to do a comedy fall trying to chase after her park ticket which she had dropped and was blowing away! (Sarah - I can´t help being a bit clumsy!)
The glacier is really amazing and its hard to believe that something like that can just grow. First we took a boat trip on the iceberg channel in front of the south face of the glacier from where you can get and idea of the height of it (about 70m) and also sample dulce de leche liqueur with glacier ice - mmm! The ice of the glacier is blue which is a bit bizarre, some of the icebergs we went past were bright blue, apparently because the ice is formed from snow collapsing under its own weight rather than as water freezing, hence it reflects light differently from normal ice. The glacier is also bigger than Buenos Aires. (Sarah - my turn for a bit of a geology/geography lesson - apparently, the glacier creates as much ice as it loses...at least, that´s what the lady on the boat said, but if that´s the case, how can it be advancing? We´ve been told lots of times that it´s one of only a few advancing glaciers in the world...Suzi, our friendly geography teacher in training, any explanations???)
Afterwards we got to spend three hours walking on the boardwalks on the hill overlooking the glacier, watching and waiting for some bits to break off the glacier and plunge into the icy water of the lake below. Its really cool to just stand there and listen to the cannon-like reports as bits break off and the amazing noise that seems to come from seemingly inocuous snowfalls. Our patience finally paid off and we had a large bit of ice break off and crash into the water creating a massive semi-circular wave of ice that spread out into the lake. Again, I think we could have quite happily spent more time with the glacier although some rain was just starting to spit by the time we had to leave. (Sarah - apparently the glacier is more active in the sun and unfortunately, it was a bit of an overcast day.) Aside from the glacier we also befriended a German couple - Angie and Harald who had been on the same bus from Trelew and we´d seen around El Calafate as well. It gave Sarah the chance to practice yet another one of her languages! (Sarah - although not very well. I was getting ever so confused between Spanish and German and I kept forgetting really simple words like ´big´ and ´vegetables´ - very annoying!) Also, we were approached by a Kiwi with an English couple who asked if we were Kiwis because we had macpacs. Apparently he´d first spotted us in Bariloche then in Trelew and finally came to speak to us here. Quite scarey that he´d been stalking us all this way particularly as we´ve done quite an unusual route to get here! (Sarah - he was actually very friendly though and we´re hoping to see him again some time in Chile!)
And finally to today, Monday, when we decided that we´d spent far too much time on buses of late and took time out for a bit of a relax. We went for a lovely walk in a bird sanctuary on the edge of El Calafate which is around two Lagunas and borders on Lago Argentino. We saw loads of birds and even managed to identify a couple as we bought a little bird book - some caranchos (Southern Crested caracara in English apparently), Gavilan Cenicientos (Cinerous Harrier), Chimangos (Chimango caracara) and flamingoes amongst others.
Tomorrow we are taking the bus across into our fourth country - Chile - when we head for Puerto Natales. I think the money is going to take some getting used to as there are about 1,000 Chilean pesos to the pound. Hope everyone reading is well and having fun. Hasta luega. (Sarah - phew, you made it! You deserve a cup of tea now I reckon!)
Sarah´s turn for a bit...P.S. We didn´t manage to upload this yesterday as the traveljournals site was playing up so there´s now a bit more!!! Our bus to Chile was fine - we had to get off at Argentinian immigration, then get back on the bus for about another mile and off again for Chilean immigration but apart from that, nothing exciting to report. The countryside that we came through was quite nice though, especially the nearer we got to Chile - more mountains and lakes!
Puerto Natales is a bit of a funny town, not really what I expected. I think ramshackle is the best word to describe it! The Rough Guide says that there´s not much here apart from accommodation, restaurants and travel agencies and that seems to be about right. It´s in a lovely setting though. It´s on the edge of some body of water that we don´t know the name of, and just opposite is the national park of ´Torres del Paine´ which brings us nicely to what we´ll be up to for the next few days...we´ve been taken by some kind of madness and decided to do a 4 day trek in the park!!! Of course, by park I mean up, down and around mountains...I´m really not sure that I´m up to this sort of thing but we figured that if we don´t try it, we´ll never know! There seem to be quite a lot of campsites (where we can put up our hired tent and cook with our hired camping stove...how do you use them???) so if the going gets tough, we may have to do the 4 day trek in 5 or 6! We´ve seen a few people around town with tents underarm and a couple of them have said that they´re a bit worried about it too but they look a lot fitter than me! Anyway, that´s where we´ll be for the next few days and I think internet access is a bit scarce so we´ll be in touch when we get back. Keep your fingers crossed for us!!!
|  | 
|
