Argentina 2006 Cross Globe Reisverhalen / Travel stories

PENINSULA VALDES

We drove to Península Valdés where we had to sleep in the campground because everything was fully booked. When the travel guide says “Book in advance!”, they really mean it ;^). Especially in January/February, when the Argentine people have their big holidays. It was kind of a nightmare. My husband is not really keen on camping but we had taken our camping gear just in case we wouldn’t find any accommodation. We didn’t have any choice so we decided to pitch our tent on one of the free spots on the campground. The wind was blowing 110km/hour and it was hardly possible to put up the tent. Once it was standing, we put our luggage in it to prevent that our tent would fly away. The wind almost blew our tent to the ground. Luckily the wind speed reduced later that evening. Still we couldn’t sleep for a minute because all Argentine people who stayed on the campground were partying until the morning: they were listening to a football game on the radio and each time when there was a goal, several people started honking the horn of their cars, they held BBQ’s and played loud music until late in the morning. At 3 o’clock in the morning, when we heard gun shots and fireworks, the police came to make an end on the noise. We could hardly believe that such peace disturbing activities were tolerated in a protected nature reserve.
The next day we got up very early, packed our tent and booked a room in one of the most expensive hotels of Puerto Pirámides. It was important that we would get a good night of sleep so we didn’t care about the money.
Apart from that camping-night we loved Península Valdés: the Puerto Pirámides bay is very attractive, we got excited by seeing so many sea lions at Punta Norte, penguins, armadillos (called piches over there), sea elephants at Punta Cantor, ostrich-like animals, guanacos, .... there is so much wildlife in Argentina!!! Amazing! We loved it!
At Península Valdés, we had our first "driving-on-ripio" experience. In the beginning we didn't dare to drive faster than 40km/hour. It felt as if we were driving on ice, it was as if the car didn't get good grip on the road and as if we didn't have full control over the car. After a while we got used to that feeling and dared to drive up till 70km/hour. Each time when we met a car, we reduced speed and moved to the side of the road to avoid stone damage. Not everybody respected that code of conduct, some people just overtook us with a really high speed throwing stones against our car.

GAIMAN

From Puerto Pirámides we drove to Puerto Madryn. From a distance the city didn’t look very attractive because of the harbour industry in the foreground. But when entering the city it was a very clean, pleasant city with very beautiful and modern houses, especially in the areas near the coastline. Puerto Madryn has a long beach and the hill at the east side of town offers nice views over the ocean. The only reason we went to Puerto Madryn was to visit the Ecocentro that has exhibits about the marine ecosystem and sea life. But we had forgotten about the siesta! So when we arrived there at 1pm we discovered it would only open again at 5pm. What a pity!
We continued to Trelew where we admired the old steam engine “Rodolfo” and the Plaza Independencia. We doubted if we would visit the Paleontological Museum in Trelew but the weather was so nice that we decided to visit the outdoors Paleontological Park Bryn Gwyn near Gaiman. It offered a walk through a beautiful “canyon” and showed several million year old fossils of prehistoric piches (yup, the armadillos), dolphins and other animals. We liked it a lot.
Gaiman is a Welsh settlement and is known for its teahouses and its people who keep the Welsh culture and tradition alive. One of the traditions is the “afternoon tea-time”. Since we went at 7pm it was more like an evening tea-time. It was delicious: they served tea as much as we wanted but the tea was accompanied by home-made bread and scones, 4 different types of home-made jam, and 5 different types of cakes: lemon cake, wallnutcake, chocolate cake, etc …. As my husband and I are persons with a huge sweet tooth, we enjoyed every minute of that tea-time. It was so much and so heavy that we just skipped dinner.
Gaiman is also a town to spend half a day to a day. It’s very relaxed, an ideal place to de-stress. It has beautiful Welsh Bed and Breakfast places and Welsh chapels. We walked around and had a look at the Parque El Desafío, a kind of a “recycling art park”: it shows art pieces made of soda-cans, plastic bottles and other junk. And we also met a local artist who was creating a statue of 2 Welsh farmers.
In the beginning of my story I mentioned that we feared that the friendliness of the Argentine people would change the more we went south. But so far, the friendliness was still the same.

PUNTA TOMBO – CAMARONES – CABO 2 BAHIAS

Our plan was to visit Punta Tombo, Camarones and Cabo 2 Bahías in 1 day. We got different opinions about our plan.
Somebody said this was just craziness, another person said it was feasible to do this on 1 day
another said if we had seen Punta Tombo it wasn’t worth going all the way to Cabo dos Bahías and that it was too dangerous to take the ripio between Punta Tombo and Cabo dos Bahías. However, what we learned in all our travel experiences is: you have to do and see it yourself and judge afterwards if it was worth the trouble or not. So we stuck to our plan and visited these 3 places in one day.
We left Gaiman in the morning and drove to Punta Tombo, the habitat of half a million of Magellanic penguins. We fell in love with these little animals. We never saw so many penguins together!! It was an ideal place to study the behaviour of these funny animals: we saw them walking to the sea and diving into the water, we saw them coming out of the water and climb the hill to walk to their nests, we saw them feed their little ones, we saw them take care of their babies, …. They walk in a funny way and it just made us happy to see them walk around very close to us. They get so close that you can touch them (which is not recommended because they can bite!)
We spent 1,5 hours at Punta Tombo but we could have stayed there the whole day long, just watching these penguins. We followed the coast line ripio to Camarones and only saw 2 cars during that whole trip (3 hours drive). Luckily we didn’t have a flat tire or other car trouble. When we arrived in Camarones, we booked a room and jumped in our car to drive the last 30km ripio to Cabo dos Bahías. Another beautiful nature reserve, much less touristy than Punta Tombo. It has a big penguin colony, lots of guanacos and beautiful scenery. And for the budget travelers: wild camping is allowed on the beautiful beaches next to the road between Camarones and Cabo 2 Bahías.