Sunday, 9 January 2011 – Puerto Madryn

IT’S A LONG WAY TO PUNTA NORTE

Our port of call today was in Patagonia, but not the Patagonia of travel brochures. Here it is extremely dry and very flat. The place was settled by the Welsh in 1865, hence the Madryn part of the town’s name.

Relatively few ships stop here so that may explain why it took so long to disembark, even though we were docked and didn’t require tenders. I chose a 7.5 hour tour to Peninsula Valdes to view its sea life but even though we docked about 9.45am and our tour was to start at 10am, it took so long to queue up and get down the gangway that our tour didn’t leave to 11am. We still had to be back by the same time, all aboard by 5.30pm so we effectively lost one hour from the tour.

Leaving the town we passed houses which were unlike any I’d seen elsewhere in South America. They could easily be transposed to beachside towns in Australia or North America and not look out of place. After a quick stop at the Interpretation Centre we reached the little beach resort of Puerto Piramides, where we stretched our legs and had a look around the few shops and dark sandy beach area for half an hour.

 



Puerto Piramides

  Most of the Valdes Peninsula is privately owned by one person and is used for sheep farming, in particular merino sheep which had been brought in from Australia many years back. The land here is flat, there is no grass or water or shade and the only vegetation is scrubby bush about 60 cm high – the ratio is one sheep per 5 hectares. From the leaves the animals get their liquid intake. The poor sheep looked really scrawny and I bet they were lamenting the day their ancestors had been earmarked for export to this hostile environment.

We finally arrived at Punta Norte just after 2pm to spend 1 hour and 20 minutes viewing the Southern seal lions and seals – so it was a long time spent in a coach today to view them. I’ve seen what have been called sea lions before but these do look like sea lions with the males sporting huge heads with ‘manes’ – seriously ugly!!! We were extremely lucky with the timing of our visit as there were a lot of newborn pups – they sounded like lambs bleating – and some of our group saw one being born while we were there. There were also quite a few fights between the very territorial make sea lions who also chased off male seals whenever they tried to come ashore. 




Male sea lion with crab eater seals

 


Sea lion family - including new pups which are black

  

We also saw an Orca offshore too. All up a good afternoon of wildlife viewing.

The big advantage of choosing a HAL sponsored excursion is that the ship will wait if the tour is back late. All aboard was at 5.30pm but our coach didn’t make it back to 5.40pm with several other coaches arriving after us. As soon as the last passenger got onboard the gangway was removed and we pulled away from the dock at 6 pm.

The entertainment tonight in the Showroom was David Aitken – an interactive comedic juggler – meaning don’t sit too close to the stage otherwise you are going to be part of the entertainment (I sat upstairs). It was a pretty funny act!