The Coast of Argentina

Actually, we are now inland in Patagonia at the eastern side of the Andes Parque Nacional Los Galciares. We first visited the Perito Moreno Glacier in the southern section of the park, near El Calafate. (Look for Ainsley’s upcoming posting about trekking on the glacier.) Today we are in El Chalten, in the northen section of the park, listening to the wind blow and blow while the rain whips. In fact, we have been here for two days and have yet to see the famous Fitz Roy peak because of all of the clouds and rain. Hopefully the weather will clear and we will see it before we leave tomorrow. We head further north then, planning to have TV coverage wherever we are on election night. We’ll post some pictures soon about our hikes around El Chalten, but here we will catch you up on all of the wildlife from the coast in this posting.

Reserva Faunistica Peninsula Valdes

The Lonely Planet Guidebook says that this is one of South America’s finest wildlife reserves and we definitely concur. What I didn’t appreciate from reading the book and looking at the maps was the massive size of the peninsula. It has a total area of more than 3,600 sq km and more than 400 km of coastline. We drove over 250 km the day we visited the three main wildlife-viewing sites on the Peninsula. Of course, we saw the Southern Right Whale that Jack wrote about, but we also saw sea lions, elephant seals, Magellanic penguins, guanacos, sheep, rheas and plenty of seabirds. We hoped to be lucky enough to see some Orcas off Punta Norte, but there were no sightings the day we visited. Six were seen the day before, but it wasn’t to be for us. If you have ever seen film footage of orcas lunging onto shore to snatch a baby sea lion or sea elephant for lunch, it was filmed at Punta Norte on Peninsula Valdes, the only place where orcas have been seen to exhibit this behavior.

Overall, we were all awe struck by the wildlife we were able to see on the Peninsula. Seeing it on TV and in books is one thing, but actually seeing these animals up close was stunning. Kelli and the kids even watched a whale directly below them from the Puerto Madryn town pier for about 15 minutes. Just like the whale on our whale watch, it was right there for them to observe only two feet from the pier. What a great thing!

Gaiman and Parque El Desafio

We stayed one night in the small town of Gaiman after departing the Peninsula. The main attraction here was the teahouses resulting from the town’s Welsh heritage. No surprise that Kelli would search out a teahouse during our travels. We had a very relaxing down day here, enjoying the treat of afternoon tea, playing at the playground and exploring the most bizarre park we have seen, Parque El Desafio. Eccentric octogenarian Joaquin Alonso, the “Dali of Recycling,” created this park constructed exclusively of recycled beer cans, soda bottles and other materials, which gained it Guinness World Record status in 1998 as the Earth’s largest ‘recycled’ park. Amidst the truly zany designs he has painted small plaques with humorous sayings such as ‘Si quieres vivir major, mezcla a tu sensatez unos gramos de locura’ (‘If you want to live better mix up your sensibility with a few grams of craziness’). That he certainly did in building this park.

Reserva Provincial Punta Tomba

Yes, we saw Magellanic penguins on Peninsula Valdes, but we didn’t truly see them until our visit to Punta Tomba, Continental South America’s largest penguin nesting colony. There are more than 500,000 penguins in this colony and the number can grow close to 1 million after the two eggs from each of the 175,000 or so nesting pairs hatch in November and the juveniles from the season before return to molt in February. What a site that must be! We were fortunate anyway to walk through the park and observe the penguins keeping their eggs warm in their nests dugout from the desert-like ground, see them walking the “penguin highways” to the ocean and watch them zoom at fast speeds under the water. We also found a pair of English speaking park rangers who were able to answer the kids many, many questions about the their migration patterns, breeding and other aspects of penguin life in general.

Monumento Natural Bosque Petrificados

After our “lovely” (said with much sarcasm) stay in Comodoro Rivadavia, a powerhouse in the now privatized Argentinean oil industry, we headed further south, stopping at a petrified forest park. I had seen a petrified forest during my family’s cross country trip in 1976, but Kelli had yet to see one. So, this was a priority for her and a good side trip for the kids. We had some explaining to do for Eliot, that while this is called a forest, the petrified trees won’t be standing up in an actual ‘forest’. After a 40+ km drive down yet another dirt road, we had a great time looking at the massive petrified logs (some more than 7 feet in diameter) and learning about how they were first covered by ash from a nearby volcano some 150 million years ago and then began the petrification process when water carried various minerals into the wood. One of the most interesting things was the variety of colors in the petrified wood, resulting from the different minerals. This was also the location of our fox pictures for Pop, Pop. After a brief stop of 2 hours or so, we continued further south to Puerto San Julian.

I’m sitting here in the internet kiosk with really slow internet access and am running out of time for this posting. So, I’ll do another one soon with our time in Puerto San Julian, Parque Nacional Monte Leon, Perito Moreno Glacier and El Chalten.