No wildlife............

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Another long bus ride, another destination reached, this time Puerto Madryn on the east coast of Argentina. First impressions are of an English seaside town, but out of season. It has all the elements, the shingle beach, the pier, take away shops on the front, but because it is now heading into winter, everything is closed...................really reminds us of Brighton or Barmouth in October. The reason for coming here is the abundance of wildlife. The Valdes peninsula is a world heritage site for nature and is home to sealions, penguins, Southern right Whales and best of all Orca´s. We booked ourselves on a trip to go and see all of the above, but nature being nature you are only given a 3% chance of spotting an Orca, fair enough. We were warned as the season ends in April there may not be as much wildlife as normal......................well they weren´t lying.....................It was an all day trip 2 hours to get to the first beach where seals and sealions rest and where Orcas come into shore and eat them right from the beach (like in a David Attenborough doc), well there were a few seals and 2 sealions, sadly no Orcas turned up, think they were a bit shy that day. That was also the end of the wildlife for the day, went onto the next beach about 2 hours again where they have a huge penguin colony. I asked the guide how many are normally there at the height of the season, he replied upto a million, today there were none! Next stop to see sealions, again i asked, how may blah blah blah, response, upto 5000, today 2...................this pattern continued all day, we did get to see some armadillos though which were cool, and some nice windswept beaches, but other than that it was a long long day in a car seeing not a great deal..............Just goes to show you cant rely and the pesky little critters putting in an appearance all the time, was still good to see the peninsula though, but we left slightly dissapointed.

Our last day here and we hired bikes to go to another headland, my god it was hard work, the first few miles were on a road, so fine, then it turned into a gravel path, not as easy but still OK, but then it changed again into a sand path, now i like riding but on sand it was impossible so after about 6 miles we gave up all together and trudged back. However, on the way back we found an Eco centre, that had loads of information on all the wildlife, that is currently not present, from the area, this was excellent and well worth a visit, loads of interactive stuff and interesting installations, also gave our legs an hour to recover from the quicksand cycling. The rest of the day there was a power cut in the town which lasted for hours, that was the cue to move on................next even further south to Patagonia.

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Photos

A few Seals
This was the extent of the abundant wildlife of the peninsula.