Puerto Madryn, Argentina - 17-19 Nov

We arrived in Puerto Madryn early the next morning and went in search of our hostel, La Tosca. Mario who welcomed us, was pretty much like a tour guide and took as through all the options that were available to us in Puerto Madryn. Armed with this knowledge we headed off to explore the beachfront and to find some lunch. Puerto Madryn is quite pretty and I suppose it’s a bit like Hermanus in that it is centred around the whale season, but it’s really dry and so the vegetation around the coast is very arid, more like the Karoo! And they farm sheep there too! I was feeling at home, haha!

The beachfront before lunch and the wind started

We chose a beachfront restaurant for lunch and settled down and ordered some drinks and a “seafood platter” for 2 just as the wind was picking up to gale force. Well, our “seafood platter” arrived and we were a little surprised to say the least. It was all in small little bowls and 2 larger bowls in the middle. The middle 2 were fried calamari, which was pretty good, and fried anchovies, we didn’t get through too many of these. The remaining bowls comprised of: 4 bowls pickled squid and oysters (not sure about these), 2 of empanada fish and prawns (good), one boiled prawn (not bad) and a few random others. The next problem was that as the wind got stronger the sand started blowing off the beach into our food and made our “seafood platter” all the more tasty, yummm! Tess and I agreed that it was a good experience but not one to be repeated!

The next day we had our tour to Peninsula Valdes and a boat trip to go watch the whales. We got picked up at 8am and picked the rest of our 20 strong tour group and headed for the peninsula an hour and a half away. We arrived at Puerto Piramides to get on the boat for our whale watching, a 50 man rubber dinghy that they launch straight from the beach with massive tractors and trailers. We headed 15 mins into the bay to find the whales, currently there are about 300 in the bay, at the height of whale breeding season there are about 700, so it didn’t take us too long.

When we got there the captain turned off the engines and we pretty much just floated and watched the whales. We saw loads and they come so close to the boat it is amazing. There were obviously many mothers with calves, the calves are pretty inquisitive and some come right up to the boat and go underneath the boat. We were also treated to a tail slapping display that is supposedly a form of communication for the whales and some jumping to top it all off. The hour went by so quickly watching the whales, we wished we could have spent the whole day there. It was so amazing and so surreal to be so close to these creatures that are just massive!

After we got back from the whale watching we headed off in the bus to see a penguin colony and some elephant seals lying on the beach. It’s not quite the season for the seals yet so there were not too many and we didn’t see any very large males (they get up to 4000kgs), but it was good to see. We also saw a few armadillos, cute little buggers and a first for both of us. We’d heard that orcas (killer whales) had been spotted on the coast the previous day but sadly we missed out. After the whale watching it was a pretty long afternoon in the bus and not particularly entertaining.

The next morning before we were due to head off we went for a long walk along the beach, Puerto Madryn has a really wide and long beach and we walked for about 2 hours on the beach before we headed back to our hostel for breakfast and to pack our stuff up for another mammoth bus ride.

The highlight of our time in Puerto Madryn was definitely the amazing boat trip among the whales! But now we were headed to El Calafate in the south of Patagonia to find some glaciers!

A parting shot of the amazing whales at Puerto Madryn