Rocky roads and sunburn

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The Spanish language has a great word to describe the roads in much of this lovely country - ripio - but more of that later.



We flew down to the town of Trelew with Aerolieas the other night in the hope of seeing some wildlife and maybe getting some cooler weather - we got the first but not the latter.

Puerto Madryn is the big draw in this area, but muggins´here stayed in Trelew for a few nights as it was closer to the airport. The hotel we stayed in (Touring) had lost much of it´s glory since the days when the first Welsh people came to this part of Argentina in an effort to escape English oppression (and Wales if any of my experiences of the place are anything to go by). This wasn´t necessarily a bad thing - we were probably in need of a few quiet nights in watching football and not drinking after the last month at home and the week in BA. The fact that Argentina lost in the first pre-World Cup friendly went some way towards dampening the enthusiasm of the locals in any case.

Having spent the obligatory half a day organising flights out (and getting somewhat ripped off in the process), we decided to hire a car and to go see some penguins at the Punto Tombo reserve about 100miles away. Driving manual cars on the other side of the road took me some time, especially as much of the 100miles was on the aforementioned ripio roads, but we made it, and got about a million photos of the penguin colony (will post asap). It really is a bizarre experience watching penguins hiding in the shade beneath tour buses whilst the sun beats down above - when I went to school I learned that penguins were creatures of colder climes. McAdams got sunburn needless to say.

The next day, we headed to Puerto Madryn for a bit more life - think a kind of Blackpool of the south with more tourists, good hotels and a beach with no stones. A vast improvement on Trelew. We took the car on a fairly long (and ripio) drive to the Peninsula Valdes reserve further north. More of the extremely long, crappy roads through nowhere - I´ve never seen so much emptiness. I hear that most of Patagonia is like this, and there is some attraction in getting this far away from it all. We even saw some really strange animals called guanaco's (a cross between a horse and a llama - brown and white and quite big), as well as emu-like birds and hairy armadillos, which are the rats of the Patagonian countryside.



The big attraction of the Peninsula is the whales, which naturally were not here at this time of year, though there was a slim chance of seeing an orca (killer whale), which are known to occasionally come right up on to the beach at high tide and snatch some of the thousands of sealions before arching their back and swimming off for their tea. We didn't see any, but the sealions and elephant seals were cute. The sunburn got worse.

On the way back, my confidence was rising somewhat with the driving, and my speed increasing a bit. Then we saw a herd of guanacos off to the side - I turned to look just as the car hit an especially dodgy bit of ripio road and the car started to wave out of control on the road..until we careered off into the 6ft ditch at the side of the road, and luckily (for my heart was in my mouth at this point) landed on the far side on all 4 wheels. Once I´d remembered that the best way to slow the car down and thus not hit the fence about 60m ahead (never mind flip the car) was to take my foot from the accelerator, we gradually slowed to a stop. Not fun, but thankfully no damage done to either of us, nor the car, amazingly.

Instead of pausing, we managed to get the car up the bank and on to the road and back to the safety of the bar in Puerto Madryn, where we consoled ourselves with rum Cocktails and more meat.

On the last day, we took a spin to the palaentogical reserve near Trelew. This is a really cool place for anyone interested in fossils - a natural valley in the middle of the boring desert where you can walk up some 500m through the various layers of deposits left by the advancing and retreating atlantic ocean over the past squillion years and see fossilised armadillos, shells (very strange 500m up), dolphins and other wierd and wonderful creatures. If only I had a hammer with me, I could have spent months there looking for my very own dinosaur.

Next stop the end of the world...Ushuaia.

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Comments

[Q]

You should have done some driving practice in Donegal to prepare your self for the roads! Glad to hear you're both still alive though. Keep eating the meat. BTW...you may enjoy this.... http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1724116,00.html