Back to Nature

Enduring a 20-hour bus ride to see some animals; that’s what we did after leaving Buenos Aires. We went to Puerto Madryn, at the northern edge of Patagonia. What’s there? Well, we hoped to see a lot of frolicking exotic animals, but instead we saw a lot of lazy and lethargic animals. There are several nature reserves here where you can see whales, sea lions, elephant seals and (most importantly) penguins in their natural habitat. It is definitely cool, but unfortunately most of the animals were more interested in just lying there, rather than performing fun animal rituals for us, such as hunting, eating, mating, fighting etc etc. Lazy jerks.

We saw whales, which was pretty cool because I had never seen whales before. We were too cheap to spring for the whale-watching boat, but you can watch them from the shore, they are only about 100 meters off shore! I took about a thousand pictures, of which 990 turned out as blurry water pictures, because the whales were too fast for me.

The highlight was definitely the penguins. Near Puerto Madryn, at a place called Punto Tombo, the largest colony of Magellanic penguins outside of Antarctica can be found. It was wild! The penguins were everywhere, thousands of them, and if you didn’t watch where you were walking, you would probably step on one. Most of these guys were also just lazing in the sun, but a few were walking, scratching, swimming and making penguin noises so we were completely satisfied (20 bus-hours well worth it!).

-E

Patagonia - miles and miles of flat, uninteresting land

Sleeping elephant seal

Finally an elepant seal doing something besides laying there



Elephant seal colony



It would be a shame to disturb the wildlife as it lounges around



Hanging out with our new friends

 

Lots of penguins



Penguins and guanacos living in harmony

Look closely!  A whale fin!