Our tour started in Buenos Aires on 28th March and finishes in Santiago on 30th April. It takes in all the main things to see and do in Patagonia and Southern Chile. This blog entry will focus on the first section of about a week or so.
We drove South from Buenos Aires for a couple of days to reach Puerto Madryn. This town is the site of the landing of the first Welsh settlers to Patagonia and the gateway to the Peninsular Valdes national park. This national park is a sanctuary for wildlife, particularly sealion colonies, elephant seals, penguins and armadillos. There are also guanacos (the wild relative of the llama), patagonian hares and lesser rheas. It is most famous as the only place in the world where orcas have developed the hunting habit of swimming right on to the beach to grab a sealion for dinner. Obviously this doesn't happen everyday and when it does it may not be within visual distance of the designated viewpoints. You could come here many times and never see an orca at all. The BBC crew that filmed this behaviour for David Attenborough's Trials of Life series were here for a week to get the footage they wanted. So we were incredibly lucky. We saw 2-3 orcas swimming up and down the coast near the viewpoints and while we were there one did take and sealion from the beach. Unfortunately, I had popped to the loo at the wrong time so didn't actually see it but I did see them cruising which was amazing in itself. They were too far away for a good picture though.
We continued through Patagonia via the Welsh village of Gaiman where we stopped for a Welsh tea (at 11:30 in the morning!). The village seems to exist on its Welshness and the Welsh language is taught in schools to keep it alive. The tea was the first decent cup I've had in Argentina who seem to only make very weak blends. There were also many more cakes than we could eat! It was lovely :-)
Next stop from here was the second biggest Magellan penguin colony in Argentina just south of Camarones. The biggest is a little further North but much more touristy - we had this one to ourselves. The penguins were everywhere covering a huge area from the sea inland quite a way. And they make such a noise! It is moulting season right now and once they finish they will migrate away from the colony for the winter returning to breed in the spring. They mate for life and you see many couples together which is pretty cute.
We camped that night just outside the penguin colony and were slightly delayed leaving the next day because the other group travelling parallel to us had managed to sink their truck nearly 2 feet deep in soft gravel and sand. We stayed to help them dig it out. There was much digging and the collecting of flat rocks to build a firmewr 'road' under the wheels. Eventually a digger was found in the town to come and drag it out. I'll let the pictures do the talking....
From here we travelled south a few hundred km further and spent the night at a couple of campsites along the way. One was on an island in the middle of a river, Isla de Pavon, and although we were the only people there at this time of year it looked like it would be a lovely and busy place in summer. We had a barbecue here and we bowled over by two adorable puppies whose home we camped next to!
We then turned inland and headed for the Andes and El Chalten. Nick has put some details of what we did there on his running blog, Hiking the Viedma glaciar and Trekking in El Chalten
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