South along the Atlantic coast

I’m falling a little behind on the blog front. There’s just too much to write about and now I’m writing even slower because I have had to bandage each of my index fingers and middle fingers together with baby wipes to keep them cool because the bloody Doxycycline I’ve been taking to avoid malaria has resulted in my skin suffering from heightened photosensitivity. I’ve managed to seriously burn not only my nose, which has thankfully now healed but also parts of my fingers which are faring far worse than my nose and have now broken out in some sort of slightly swollen lumpy reddy purple rash and are extremely painful. I’ve heard that although uncommon, this can happen and therefore I’ve ditched the Docxy and am having to loosely cover up my sore fingers, firstly in an attempt to stop any more sun getting to them and secondly so I can’t see them coz they’re mingin. It certainly made trekking in Chile’s national forest fun, clambering round in a tent and continuously having to get things in and out of really small pockets. I think that’s why they are even worse now. Anyway, the trekking is the subject of the next post. I have to cover the east coast first and what we got up to there.

Puerto Madryn was our first stop after Buenos Aires. After 20 hours, 2 breakdowns – one mechanical, one due to a flatty and some awful driving in pouring rain the coach finally arrived at the lovely seaside town which is south of Buenos Aires. We arrived at the bus station in the morning and the three of us headed toward hostel El Gualicho, a hostel that had been well reviewed on someone else’s blog. The three of us being Me, Tim and yet another stray dog that had decided to come along for the journey in the hope of a better life. There are so many what look like strays out here, but most of them look pretty healthy and each is affectionately referred to by us as a ‘rabies’. The hostel looked nice and I told rabies to wait outside for us. If he did he could then come along to the beach once we had sorted ourselves out, but I saw that he didn’t even wait 5 minutes before heading off looking for another opportunity. Oh well, his loss. We left our bags at the hostel whilst they cleaned out the rooms and we headed off to the beach. We got there super early and there was hardly anyone around. We found a cafe for a massively yummy breakfast of coffee and cream cheese and fruits, sitting on white leather sofas overlooking the sea with some chilled out music playing from the bar. Seriously, this was a far cry from the hectic city life we had just experienced and was very welcomed.

A great breakfast spot after an all nighter on a bus

Beach at Puerto Madryn in the morning

The perfect breakfast

We spent our first day exploring the beach and the headland. We flew our little pocket kite – thanks Chuckie and it even soared higher than the Argentinean flag. This place is seriously windy. It was our first taste of the Patagonian wind that everyone talks about. Windbreakers lined the beach and in the afternoon, they erected little windproof plastic cubicles with seating areas for people to sit in so as not to get blown away whilst having a beer.

Our kite flying higher than the Argentinian flag

This is where we are versus you guys

Everyone, I mean everyone takes a laptop travelling these days. Bit weird! 

Thinking back, it was probably in one of these very cubicles that I managed to roast my fingers and nose. The town itself is very pleasant too, although it’s quite touristy and everything you can buy or see has been stamped with a logo of a penguin. 

Me trying to fit in with the locals

This is because this is the place you come to organise your tour to Punta Tombo to see the colony of ½ a million Magellan penguins that flock to the area to have their babies. It’s also the place to spot whales and orcas at certain times of the year, together with other sea life and best of all, one of the best places in the world to swim with sea lions. Of course, all these excursions are expensive, so we thought hard and long, over a few beers as to what our plan might be and what we could afford. Whale watching was a risk because we are really near the end of the season, so rather than paying for a tour out on a boat, we hired a couple of bikes for the day and cycled 20km north to a place called El Dorradillo where apparently if you are lucky you could spot the whales from the coast. It was a stinky ride for the first hour alongside the port outside town and then onto a thick dusty gravel road where cars hurtled past and you had to hold your breath to avoid ingesting stones for the next 5 minutes and finally uphill past a smelly fish factory. But then it got better and after another hilly 45 minutes or so we reached a point where the sea was visible and there in the distance we saw a whale playing about in the water. He was flipping about and crashing back into the sea on his back. He was about the size of a pea as we were very far away but it was really exciting and after watching him for 5 minutes we jumped back on the bikes to get closer to where he was. Unfortunately however, there were no more whales to be seen that afternoon. We watched the spot we had seen him for a further 2 hours but he didn’t surface again. It was quite hard because it was really windy and this was creating little white crests of waves across the entire bay making spotting any unusual movements in the water quite difficult. But we sat on the rocks and scanned from one side of our view to the other, like watching a slow motion game of tennis before finally calling it a day a few hours later. The landscape here was amazing though – very moon like (apart from all the water obviously) and it was great having seen the whale initially but it had set our hopes quite high at seeing more if we persisted. Instead it seemed we had been very lucky to see anything at all. Apparently lots of the tours saw nothing across a couple of days.

Hot rides mean lots of water and turban wearing

Tim watching for whales

After a long ride, beer and chips. Mmm.

A few days later we did one of the most incredible things. By opting to hire bikes rather than do the tour and by cooking our own really cheap food for a few days at the hostel we managed to save the £85 which was enough to treat ourselves to the trip of a lifetime – definitely one of the best things I’ve ever done. We swam with sea lions! It’s a great place to do it because there is a sea lion reserve in the area and each day 4 boats are allowed to enter this protected area, keeping a set distance from the shore and each can spend an hour diving and snorkelling with the sea lions. They are so tame and playful. The males rarely enter the water, they mainly lay out on the shore surrounded by a harem of 15 or so females, but the other females and younger pups swim about and they are so friendly and so inquisitive. They behave like excited puppies when you enter the water. They nip at your fingers in a really playful way and swim all around you. You can stroke and tickle them and at times are totally surrounded by them. They can swim really fast too, but never crash into you. They are so graceful in the water. Me and Tim played with one female who was so sweet for about 5 minutes. She kept swimming right up to our faces and once, out of the water, she planted a big kiss on my face and knocked my snorkel off. They look at you with this curious expression and love to make eye contact. It’s unreal and by being able to touch them and stroke them, you really feel a bond. Seriously one of the most incredible things I’ve done. The guys we went with took a few photos and some video. Amazing!

Working the wetsuit

I have the pink snorkel. Tim next to me. So is a sea lion!

Our crew and other guests

The next few days were spent dong a few more cycles and even a couple of early morning runs to try to work off the beer and chips and pasta dinners and to try to get us in shape for some serious amounts of trekking that were to come within a week or so down in Torres Del Paine in Chile where we were steadily making planes to hike the famous W circuit (next blog post).

However, before heading down that way there was one thing left to do and that was visit the penguins that live at Punta Tombo, another protected area but open to the public and home to over 250,000 penguin couples who at this time of year were hatching their eggs. It was going to be seriously cute. However, we were again looking at having to take a tour to this area as it was off the beaten track and although only £35, this was near enough our daily budget and having already done the sea lion snorkelling, we felt it was too much to just suck up. So we decided to head an hour south to a town called Trelew which was an hour nearer the penguin colony and chance our luck that we could find some other backpackers to perhaps share a taxi with which would seriously reduce the cost. Our plan worked but rather than taking a taxi, we hired a car and shared the driving with a French couple who were in a similar predicament to us. They were a lovely couple, who had been travelling from north to south through Central and South America for 11 months and were heading home very soon, back to France for Xmas. They were able to give us loads of tips of things to see and do along our way and probably saved us a ton of money in the long run by telling us there’s no need to drink bottled water here. The tap stuff is fine. That’s probably one extra beer each day!

The French couple had learnt Spanish at school and after this long stint in South America they were pretty much fluent, which helped out massively, especially when we crashed the car in town on the way back, about 2 blocks from our hostel. Oops! It totally wasn’t all our fault, but whilst faltering at a junction, a young local lad accidently donked us from behind. Luckily, the Spanish speaking French couple were able to phone the hire car company to sort things out and managed to keep the quite scared looking lad there until the car hire guy came along to check out what had happened and take details. Hopefully the young lad won’t be stung too hard, but it was lucky he was sound enough to stick around. Apparently if he had scarpered, we’d be US$800 poorer. Close one that’s for sure.

Anyway, the penguins at Punta Tombo were awesome, as penguins always are. They bumbled about, guarding their nests and weren’t perturbed by us tourists in the slightest. It was a bit weird but they seemed to like making their nests in holes in the ground. I had expected them to nest closer to the sea, but it was up to 1km to the shore for many penguin couples. Some were a bit dozy in the afternoon sunshine but others waddled around. It was a bizarre landscape though with all these holes in the ground filled with penguins. It looked like penguins on mars or a little like that game where animals’ heads pop out of holes and you have to hit them with a hammer? There were definitely a lot of penguins and after a few hours we were pretty much penguined out so headed on back to Trelew, unaware of the unnecessary hecticness of the crash to come!

Awesome graffetti in Trelew

Pingu on a mission

My favourite - a little dude

Same little dude

Penguins in holes!

Baby Pingu!

My being a penguin

The place was feull of these big fellas - guanacos that looked huge next to the penguins

Later that evening we jumped onto another bus and headed 17hrs further south to Rio Gallegos which was to be a connection stop only before changing buses and taking another 5 hours west and across the border to Puerto Natales – our first destination in Chile and the gateway to the National Park, Torres del Paine which is worldy famous for incredible hiking in the mountains. We decided this was a better plan than heading to Ushuaia, Argentina’s most southern town. Although tempting to reach this southern point, it was a long way further south and with temperatures not set to exceed 2C any time soon and biting Pacific winds, we decided to give it a miss.

However, as it happened, there weren’t any buses that day to Chile and everything was a bit up in the air at the border due to strikes at the Chilean side, so we decided to stick around in Rio Gallegos for the night and try our luck at crossing the border the day after. Operation mission to Chile. To mentally prepare for it, we went out and had a few beers with a few guys we befriended at the hostel in Rio Gallegos. A small and almost slightly too bouncy Spanish speaking French girl who loved making friendship bracelets, a German girl who on first impressions appeared rather surely but turned out to be quite friendly and had once been to Winchester, and a quite young but cute looking English speaking German guy who seemed to have been clawed in and taken hostage by the overly bouncy French girl. Not too bad a town for a quick stopover. The German guy and French girl were apparently on route to head to Chile a few days after us. We haven’t seen them since though. We think he might be handcuffed somewhere being forced to make her friendship bracelets. We made some food and hit the hay, ready for our attempt into Chile in the morning.