Puerto Madryn

Destinación número 3: Puerto Madryn

We left Mar del Plata and set out for a coastal city to the south called Puerto Madryn, on the Peninsula Valdes. The peninsula is devoted to wildlife preservation and hosts large colonies of elephant seals, sea lions, and Magellanic penguins. Between August and December you can also see whales and Orca off the coast where they arrive to mate in warmer waters. We had booked only two nights in the hostel and had to choose between the two main destinations, the Peninsula Valdes tour, which showcases mostly sea lions, elephant seals and a few penguins, or Punta Tombo, which hosts around 500,000 penguins, the largest colony of Magellanic penguins in the world. For me, the choice was easy. Big fatty sloth-like sea lions or cute little penguins waddling around, bringing food to their fuzzy little babies... so off to Punta Tombo we went!

Our tour guide Mauricio picked up about 10 of us in his little tour van and we made our way to Punta Tombo, a couple hours south of Puerto Madryn. I guess I was expecting a penguin mating ground to look like Alaska with a chill in the air and little bird nests all over the ground. Punta Tombo has a barren, scrubby landscape that reminded me of west Texas (Mauricio even asked me if it looked like home... we asked how he knew that and he said he had seen “No Country for Old Men”) and the penguins live in little holes dug into the ground and stay away from the heat by hiding under the bushes and any other shade they can find. The chicks had hatched from their eggs in November and their cute gray fuzz was already molting into sleeker black and white feathers. Even though they looked half-mangy in their mid-molt state, they were still really stinkin' cute. Many of them had wandered away from their nests, anxiously awaiting some regurgitated fish from one of their parent's mouths. Yummy.

Punta Tombo wasn't just crawling with penguins... there were also hordes of tourists milling around, getting in the penguins' way as they made their way down toward the rocky beach to head out to the sea for food. As you can see, I also took the liberty of getting all up in their grill to get the cutest photos possible, but we were told to stay on the walkway, away from their nests and to pause to allow them to make their way across our paths and out to the shore. (Penguins always have the right-of-way.)

After several hours of taking endless penguin photos and videos, our small group made our way back to the bus and drove back to Puerto Madryn via a Welsh town called Gaiman. Apparently, some of the Welsh were feeling a bit oppressed by the English (who wasn't?) and were seeking religious freedom as well as the liberty to speak and write and worship in their own crazy, nonsensical language (these people have never heard of vowels). Anyway, some of them landed in Argentina where land was cheap and settled in the Puerto Madryn area. Their numbers have dwindled and few still speak Welsh, but their towns still have lots of Welsh structures and their tea houses. We stopped there for some tea and scones but when Jeff and I and our two Israeli friends realized we'd be paying around $17 USD each for tea and crumpets, we skipped out and found some beer and pizza instead :) So... cute town, but I still have no idea if Welsh tea is really worth raving over.

On our last day in Puerto Madryn, we decided that since we were missing out on the sea lions in Puerto Madryn we would seek them out on our own. We had heard that they sometimes beach themselves around town, so we rented bikes and decided to head to Punta Lomas, the site of a large sea lion colony about 17 km outside of town. We took off and immediately the paved road ran out and was just sand and gravel. In case you've never tried it, biking on sand is virtually impossible. We kept going for several kilometers and finally decided to take a break and walk our bikes off the road so we could take a path down to the pebbly shore. We decided then and there that there was no need to spend all day biking all the way to Puntas Lomas only to spend 15 minutes there before we had to bike back in order to make it in time to catch our night bus out of Puert0 Madryn. (Plus, upon telling the woman at the smoothie stand that we were off to Punta Lomas, she told us that we would DIE on the way unless we carried about 6 liters of water with us...) So we relaxed for a bit and headed back into Puerto Madryn. We got off the bikes and wandered out onto a long boardwalk to take some pictures. I heard some snorting and grunting and looked over the railing and saw some fatty sea lions lounging around off the stairs of the boardwalk. After seeing several thousand penguins and seven or eight sea lions, I felt like we had gotten our fix and could safely leave Puerto Madryn.

After we saw the sea lions, we hopped a bus bound 19 hours south for Patagonia. More on our travails to the other end of the earth and the most stunning landscapes on the planet in the next post.