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Published: December 7th 2009
Before leaving home my knowledge of Patagonia was limited to the fact that they spoke Welsh there. The image I had of it was some kind of mini Wales in the middle of Argentina. This is not at all accurate. Patagonia takes up almost half of Argentina and the Welsh speakers are concentrated in a couple of small towns. Our first stop was a town called Peurto Madryn. Upon arrival Valentina was immediately pestering me to arrange our visit to see the Welsh communities (her Welsh heritage stretches back just the 1 generation). The following day we set off on a tour of the area which began with a visit to a penguin colony, they nest from the sea up to a mile inland which means that we walked right through them. Our guide informed us that as we were going to be so close to the penguins we had to be sensitive to their behaviour, particularly anyone wearing black shiny shoes as males can mistake them for females and become attracted to their legs. Being 'sensitive' meant that anyone who found a penguin attempting to mate with their leg was not able to kick them off and had to wait
for the penguin to leave of his own free will. Much to my disappointment I didn´t see this happen. We did see some of the first chicks of the summer being born though.
In the afternoon we went to a Welsh town called Gaiman. After a short tour of the town we were taken to a Welsh Tea House. Here we had tea, scones and cakes (a number of which neither of us had ever seen anywhere in the UK). Very nice all the same and there was a lot of it, Valentina is very proud of the fact that she unsurprisingly manged to eat all of hers. Whilst enjoying our tea we were befriended by a Japanese man on the neighbouring table. We made the usual polite small talk, he then asked where we were from and sure enough it made his day when Valentina revealed Wales. So he took a picture of the Welsh girl enjoying her ´Welsh tea´ in Argentina. A bit bizarre.
The next day we went out to see the main attraction of the area, the whales. Southern Right Whales for those interested. I´d never heard of them either. I´m always a bit
sceptical when going on tours like this as to whether we will actually see anything. These thoughts were soon alleviated when we could see the whales from the beach. Once out at sea we bizarrely seemed to be driving past a number of them before stopping in an area with none in. After a couple of minutes of wondering what we were supposed to be looking at a whale breached out of the water about 15 yards from our side of the boat. I admit this was very exciting, it was the size of a small bus. Then another one appeared and the two of them put on a bit of show, rolling on their backs, swimming under the boat and a bit more breaching. This was very much to the enjoyment of everyone on the boat, even the captain was screaming ´EXCELENTE!´
We then headed further south to Los Glaciers National Park. You don't have to be a linguist to realise what the main attraction here was. Despite it being late spring the weather while we were in this part of Patagonia was pretty chilly which we hadn't really prepared for. Once we'd met up with Chris and
Emma (our friends from our tour of the Salt flats in Bolivia) we headed to the Glaciers. It was quite a spectacle as you can hopefully see from the pictures. One of the most impressive things was when the ice broke off in to the water, it sounded like an earthquake.
Patagonia has now climbed up the leader board and takes the coveted prize of first place for our favourite part of the trip so far. From here we headed north and then West into Chile.
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Ash
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I went there!
I went to Puerto Madryn haha, these are the best pictures yet, the one of the whale's tail is amazing! and also the one of Dan looking a bit like a commy is good too.