Puerto Madryn

Ashley and I said goodbye to Bariloche and headed East across Argentina to the beach town of Puerto Madryn. We had no idea we would be there for the best time of year to see wildlife. And that seemed to be the theme of this city, Wildlife. We found a good hostel in town and dumped our bags after a 14 hour bus ride and then decided to take a walk on the beach. After a few minutes Ashley looked up and said ¨look, Flamingos¨ and sure enough those pink birds from the 80s were there on the beach. I was not used to seeing them without sunglasses and zig zag paterns on strech pants, but they do exist in real life.

After getting settled in town we booked a tour of Punto Tombo, a penguin colony visit that included a dolphin viewing excurison. The commodore dophins are the smallest and fastest in the world with a large white mark covering most of their body (the rest of the body is black). They loved to play with the boat and gave the crowd a good show. The dolphin came right up to the side of the boat and got close enough to blow water on our faces.

The penguin colony was a great experience. They are not scared of humans at all and we could get really close. The magellin peguins are really small and walk really funny. After seeing them swim it´s easy to tell they are built for water much more than for land. The colony hosts over a million penguins and couples return to the same nest to lay their eggs every year. It´s amazing they can remember the same nest in a massive landcape of nests. This particular peguin seemed to be pointing to his house for us.

The next adventure was to the Peninsula Valdez, which is a wildlife preserve and the breeding grounds of southern right whales. We were incredibly luckly because we were able to see whales all day and probably saw a total of 30 whales with their calves, all in all. Our tour was a lot of fun and certainly action packed. We rode about 15 minutes out of town and pulled over to beach to see a mother with her calf (the first photo). Later we borded a vessel into the bay and saw a ton of whales. Two main highlights were a rare white calf and an extremely close encounter that took our breath away. We happened to be on the right side of the boat at the right time and saw the enormous mammal start to rise right under us. The whale was so close that we could almost touch it. My heart raced and it was truly a once in a lifetime memory. We did not get great pictures because we were so captivated by these creatures and did not want to see it all through the camera lens.

Elephant seals are fat lazy animals that like to have sex. They don´t really do anything and look funny when they try to move. Not much else to say. The llama looking thing is a guanaca which is common in Patagonia.

In total we saw seals, dolphins, whales, flamingos, guancos, wild Patagonian hares, armadillos, and an ostrich-like bird in just 4 days. To cap it off we had beers at a beach bar on our last day and saw two more whales breaching in the near distance. Next was a 23 hour bus ride south to El Calafate for glacier trekking and jagged mountain hiking. More to come soon.