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Published: October 10th 2010
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As many of you already know this week is the beginning of my 2 month trip to South America where I will be working for a start-up technology company in Montevideo, Uruguay called Lynkos. The trip is part of a program sponsored by Ernst & Young and Endeavor, a non-profit, to assist developing countries in South America. Before I start work, I am spending the first week and a half of the trip traveling around Patagonia with my brother, Jeff.
A couple years ago I took a trip around the world for a few months and wrote about nearly all of the places that I visited on this website. More than anything it was a good way to share pictures with my friends and family back home, but it turned out that I actually enjoyed writing about my adventures during my trip so I figured I would do the same over the course of this trip. So if you’re bored at work and want to kill some time reading this or just take a look at a couple pictures then that’s cool, if not then that’s fine too. I will do my best to make it interesting! Also, you can
click on any of the pictures to enlarge them and remove the text (a tip for those who don't use the internet too much).
Ok enough with the background… Jeff and I took off from LAX on Wednesday October 6th and traveled for about 29 hours before we reached our first destination, Peninsula Valdez, Patagonia. Peninsula Valdez is in Southeastern Argentina and the main attraction is the wild life including whales, orcas, whale seals, sea lions, and penguins. Despite the amount of life around the ocean, the land is barren desert with some wild sheep, Guanaco (a type of Patagonia llama), and armadillo to check out from time to time as you pass along the dirt roads. On top of that, there really aren’t many people or towns out here, it’s actually amazing to me that there is even an airport since you don’t even see any building when your landing!
Our tour started in Puerto Madryn, the closest city to Peninsula Valdez. The city has a really nice bay and you can actually see Southern Right Whales breaching from the shore. But the real goal here is to head up to Punta Norte in Peninsula Valdez and
see the killer whales beach themselves in search of whale seals and sea lions resting along the beach. It’s the only place in the world where this happens and there are only about 7 orcas that use this method of hunting so you have to get lucky to see it. Also working against us was the fact that it is really early in the season to see the orcas but Pedro, our guide, had a sick new Toyota Hilux (like a Tacoma) which gave us plenty of time to go around the entire peninsula as opposed to most visitors who had to take a slow bus on hundreds of kilometers of dirt roads so we figured we would give it a shot. Pedro was a really cool guy who drove really fast and was always interested in showing us the coolest stuff so we let him make most of the decisions on where to go and he always seemed to deliver an adventure.
Anyway, we headed up to Punta Norte and within 5 minutes of arriving we saw 4 or 5 killer whales swimming parallel to the beach, about 5 yards from shore. Two of the killer whales even
rode the shore break onto the sand but couldn’t seem to grab a seal resting a couple feet away. After about 15 minutes, the killer whales took off to go mess around with a large southern right whale that was about 30 to 40 yards off the shore. To give you an idea of how strong and powerful the orcas are, they often eat the right whales which average about 60 feet in length and weigh as much as 80 tones. Needless to say this show turned out to be one of the highlights of the day especially considering that we didn’t think there was much of a chance of seeing an orca this early in the season.
From there we headed down the peninsula about 110 km taking short hikes at other points along the way to see awesome beaches, penguins and a bunch of seals. Later in the afternoon, we were scheduled to take a boat out to see the Southern Right Whales up close but it turned out that the Puerto Piramides, which isn’t really a port but instead a tractor that pushed zodiac type boats out into the bay, was “closed” due to strong winds.
As a result, we ended up taking a drive to nearby cliffs and beaches hoping to see some more whales while we waited to see if the winds would calm before sunset. It turned out that the winds didn’t calm down but the tide was high and we ended up walking up one beach where there were whales about 10 to 15 yards off shore. Its estimated that there are about 500 Southern Right Whales in the gulf, which seems reasonable since we probably saw about 30 over a period of a day and a half. A little further off shore, you could see other whales jumping completely out of water. The whales are so big that it actually seemed like they were breaching in slow motion since it would take them so long to get out of the water. It was an awesome first day that really couldn’t have turned out much better especially considering the orca and whale sightings.
Since we didn’t get to do the boat trip, we decided to wake up early and head back to the port the next morning to see if the weather had improved. As it turned out, it did and
we took the boat out for a little over an hour and saw some more whales, but it wasn’t as cool as seeing them from the shore because we were about the same distance away and the boat was moving so we would often drift away from them. In fact all but one of the pictures included here was taken from shore. This side trip also made the rest of the plans for the day about 4 hours longer since we drove for about an hour away from our next destination, Punta Tombo. From Puerto Piramides, we were headed 300 km south to Punta Tombo to see the largest penguin colony in South America.
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Aaron
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HILUX
Everyone outside the states loves this truck. They call it a "taco" down there?