Puerto Madryn and Puerto Pirmides

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Having had several comments on my writing style I´m going to make a concious effort to use punctuation from now on. (you ungrateful shower - I´m busting my hump here trying to help you pass the day at work!) Once again the memory banks have to be dredged as this seems like ages ago. If I remember rightly the trip down to PM was uneventful though the bus was late so I missed the connecting one to PP where I was to meet up with Graham and MAgda. I stayed at a place called Chepatagonia and it was the most homely hostel I´d stayed at so far run by a young couple who had the prettiest child Catarina with a funny deep voice who was totally loco at times- I hoped to learn some spanish from her as three year old spanish is about my level but even her parents had a hard time understanding her baby talk 😊 They invited everyone to a bbq which was lovely. I met one of the lads from florianopolis as I checked in - he´d managed to see the orcas in PP catching seals - its funny, when you watch the nature documentaries your sympathies are with the seals but when you´re there with your camera all you do is cheer on the whales so you can get loads of cool pics (there´s plenty of seal pups and a few won´t be missed 😊 I got into PP the next day - I hadn´t realised that it was a desert by the sea. Graham and Magda met me by the bus and blamed the arrival of the wind on me but what can I say - the food on the bus wasn¨t exactly cordon bleu. Went to sit on the cliffs and went for a swim - another paradox - desert beside a flipping freezing sea - It took me a full hour to warm up after a ten minute swim - I don´t think I´ve ever been that cold. There wasn´t a whole pile to do here if you weren´t going on the whale watching trips and as I hoped to see plenty of them when I went to the Antarctica the only ones I saw (despite trekking 10km to where they´d last been seen) were the 7 or so dead ones on the beach which stank to high heaven! The trek back through the desert was an experience though. The place only gets 200mm of rain in a year but as there were two irish in the place we managed to get caught in a storm which dropped half of it during a thunderstorm with buckets of lightning and hail right over our heads. We were sheltering in a bush by Grahams tent like gypsies while the power lines over us arced. A very interesting hour passed with the thunder arriving at the same time as the lightning 😉
One evening after getting back from dinner with Graham and MAgda I arrived to find the whole hostel on the way out to a bar with traditional Argentian music. After being warned that to get back in I´d have to come back in the window we went out til all hours- had to call it a night at 3 as we were going diving the next day. It was lovely to get back in the water though the diving was similar to ireland with poor vis and not a massive range of fish - about the same colours as Ireland and of coure the only sealions we saw were those from the boat after we had finished - Doh!
A character I met while here Kevin, nicknamed Uncle Microchips as he was part of a US army experiment involving the implanting of microchips in volunteers, started the day in the lounge of the hostel meditating on the bible - needless to say I didn´t bring up the subject of religion in any of our chats 😊 but we hung out for walks and beers. I ended upback in PM fro another night in Chepatagonia to find that Catarina had been asking where I had gone to when she woke up the day after I had left previously which was really sweet. The next stop (if I´m not mistaken was to be Bariloche for Christmas😊

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