Wales and Penguins
Friday, October 17th, 2008Day 203
We spent the rest of yesterday getting laundry done and organizing a tour today to Punta Tombo. Trelew is a decent city and has some history, it was a large Welsh settlement when the Welsh settled here from Wales back in 1800’s. Today besides a few interesting brick buildings not much survives from the Welsh past. Although Welsh folks in Patagonia does make for an interesting story. So the real reason we are here is Punta Tumbo, 100km south of Trelew and home to 500,000 penguins. Personally I find Penguins a bit more interesting than Welsh people.
We walked out of our small hotel room and into the bright warm sunshine of the morning. We booked a tour yesterday and they were due to pick us up from outside our hotel at 9am. Surprisingly we waited no more than 5 minutes when a van arrived and we climbed in. We were. Joined in our van by a few Argentines, and 2 older couples from Israel. Oh man, the older couples were too damn funny, and a bit annoying. Well mostly it was only the one lady who was annoying. She would continually interrupt the tour guide with questions and then would translate the rest for the other couple. All this while the guide tried to speak over her. Eventually the guide turned to using a microphone. It was an entertaining hour drive.
Punta Tombo, this is the largest colony of Magellanic penguins on the continent. 500,000 of the black and white birds. The word penguin is actually a Welsh word, Pen Gwyn or white head. We arrived at the beach and paid our exorbitant entrance fee. Argentines pay $12 pesos, us foriengers pay $35 pesos. I can to some degree understand two-trier pricing but this was is such a mark up. Jordana and I broke free of the rest of the group, this was not something I wanted to do with a loud group of tourists.
“OK, when we see one we can’t freak out”. Jordana said as we started to walk along the boardwalks. I knew though as soon as we spotted a penguin we’d be excited as a fat kid on halloween. “Look! Look! There, a penguin!” I excitedly said as we saw a chubby looking penguin lying under a bush. There were actually thousands of penguins everywhere, they were just hiding under bushes. I didn’t know what to expect here but I had the image of thousands of penguins just standing around. That’s not the case. Some are lazy, some are walking (VERY funny) and some are ummmm having sex. I couldn’t help but laugh every time we saw a penguin walking. As Jordana said, “They look like they have to go to the washroom.” Whatever it looked like it was damn funny. We walked along paths for over 1 km and there were penguins as for as the eye could see. We also saw some guanacos. Along the waters edge we saw another amusing sight as the penguins would waddle into the water. Then when in the water they were like completely different animals. Swimming so fast and so agile. If it wasn’t the end of our couple of hours here I think I could have stayed all day. Penguins are fascinating birds to watch.
We returned to Trelew that afternoon, grabbed our bags and jumped on the next bus to Puerto Madryn. Only 1 hour north it was nice to finally get on a bus in Patagonia that was under 10 hours. Puerto Madryn promised whale sightings and more of that “wow factor” that we’ve almost started to take for granted here in Patagonia.
Michael Coroneos