Wildlife and the Welsh

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So, I´m now in a small seaside place called Puerto Madryn. Surrounded basically by a stunning amount of flat nothing on the Argentine steppe, it, along with a few places in the area, was founded by some intrepid welshman, who thought it was obviously a good place to raise sheep. I´m not convinced it was, as they have to limit the amount of sheep to 1 every 3 hectares to avoid desertification. So you don´t necesarily seeb many.

Anyway, what there IS a lot of is coastal wildlife. It seems that everything under the sun that likes a bit of the wet stuff, finds this part of the world a good place to come and make babies.

Now, unfortunately, it´s not baby-making season for whales, so I didn´t see any of them. Oh, apart from a fossilised one in the cliff. But in last two days I have seen absurd amounts of Penguins (Magellans Penguins, apparently, and one very lost, very lonely, very tourist friendly Yellow Crested Penguin), lots of sea lions, some elephant seals (not sure I could tell the difference myself), and a handful of playful dolphins. I´m not sure what kind they were, but the were black and white, and much smaller than the bottle-nosed type star of 'flipper´ that I usually think of.

Again, sorry, no photos. I just can´t find either a computer that doesn´t crash when I connect my new camera (and the old one has finally croaked, so I can´t use that), nor one that has an internet connection stable and fast enough to handle the size of photos that it takes. I´ll try and sort something sometime, promise.

Anyway, we also popped into Gaiman, a small town also founded by them pesky welsh. Quite disturbing place in fact, familiar looking stone cottages here and there, signs in welsh, and little welsh tea-rooms dotted around waiting to suck up the tourist peso. We went into one and had some tea and cakes, and it was all very pleasant, and the only decent cup of tea your likely to find in this part of the world. It was all very surreal, and I really did expect to sea a sheep being violated at any moment....

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