Puerto Madryn Nov 30 - Dec 2

The bus journey from Bariloche was another uber-comfortable one, even including two quite watchable movies. We left at 6pm and with a couple of hours of daylight left I enjoyed the glorious scenery out the window - reminding once again of NZ but being far too big a scale to take the comparison too far.


The slopes in the valley are densely aforested with podocarp style trees and the slopes gradually get steeper until the trees are replaced with sub-alpine shrubs. Another few hundred metres higher the flora abruptly ceases as the gradient grows ever closer to vertical, and buttress-like rocks dominate thereafter to the skyline. These massive rocks act as sentinels to what goes on below.



Many waterfalls are on view, unsurprising when you have such sheer cliffs and bluffs with so much snow on top melting in the heat of the day.

We arrived in Puerto Madryn around 7am, promptly managed to find a hostel near the station, and enjoyed a couple of additional hours o This hostel is more like a cheap NZ motel - we may as well be in Hastings - but it is comfortable, has a nice lawn area, and it is not overly busy.

The town here, indeed the area, has an interesting history. If the name doesn´t seem quite Argentinian (or Spanish), it´s because it´s not - it´s Welsh. At the end of the 19th century a group of disaffected Welsh nationalists found they had had enough of oppressive rule from London and wanted to set up their own enclave elsewhere in the world, in order to preserve their language, culture, and whatever else it is it that is great in Welshdom.

They say 20% of people here still have Welsh in their genes, and it is quite apparent - with many looking to be closer to 100% extracted. Our hostess at the hostel, for example, looks as though she would be very much home in Swansea, though we are yet to see any evidence of leeks, rarebit, or talk of coalmining or rugby. And my Spanish, whilst improving, is not yet sufficiently honed to detect a possible Welsh lilt as she pronounces her ´l´s.



Puerto Madryn sits at the vertical tangent to an east facing oyster shell shaped bay. Look it up on google maps if you are not a mathematician. The area is known for its marine wildlife - Southern Right Whales, Magellanic Penguins, and Orcas in particular. However, we are right at the end of the migratory season here (luckily for me they are heading Antarctic-ward !), and so we didn´t do the customary bus tour and whalewatching, preferring instead to have a few relaxing days ahead of the anticipated mayhem that will await us in Buenos Aires.


On our first afternoon in Puerto Madryn we visited the Ecocentro which is a very well put together (albeit reasonably small) oceanographic museum, which concentrates mainly on the fauna and geography of the local area. The sea plains to the east of the continent here are amongst the flattest areas on the planet - head 1,500 km East and you are still in water ´only´100m deep.


On our walk back from the Ecocentro we spend a few hours on the beach, enjoying the warm sunset, listening to the sounds coming from the car of a self-appointed DJ, watching families at play, and overall enjoying what is undoubtedly a ´good atmosphere´. We amused ourselves with games of the ´throw stones at some sort of specified target´type, and the children next to us started their own game ´throw stones at Mum and Dad´which Mum and Dad also joined in in the form of ´throw stones at the children´. Which was all very well until Mum and Dad had long since given up, but the kids restarted the game and promptly sconed Dad a good one right on the temple. Unlucky dude.











We spent the second day much the same as the first - just using Puerto Madryn as a sort of hitching post, and recharging our batteries somewhat. Steve and I took the frisbee down to the (windy) and enjoyed a bit of a run around. One of the local wild dogs took a bit of a shining to Steve - so much so that he turned up at the bus terminal (a couple of kms away) when we left on the last day ! The dogs are actually in surprisingly good nick - presumably a human population very fond of large amounts of red meat is always going to make for reasonable sort of pickings for even feral animals.







And so it´s up to Buenos Aires from here - another lengthy coach trip - this time 20 odd hours. Such trips becoming a doddle for us. As they say here ´De Nada´.