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Patagonia - Puerto Madryn
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Our 16 hour bus ride to Puerto Madryn in the Patagonia region was interesting. We had a good feeling about the buses after our ride to Mar del Plata. Unfortunately this belief wasn´t upheld when we saw that we were going to be sitting on dirty cloth seats in the very back of the bus where the air forgot to circulate. They found a way to squeeze in five seats in the back so the room one has is decreased and we are very close to the person next to us. Luckily there was only someone there for half of the trip. It was an overnight bus ride so we pulled out our sleeping bags and tried to get cozy. Didn´t happen. It wasn´t too bad for being uncomfortable, but we definitely weren´t able to sleep easily. 16 hours later we arrived in Puerto Madryn, stinky, sweaty, dirty, sleepy and hungry.
After finding our hostel (it was brand new and pretty nice)we went out to buy our excursion tickets for Wednesday. The main attraction is the Peninsula Valdez which has a lot of sea life including sea lions, elephant seals, guanacos, rheas and orcas. What it didn´t have at this time of year were penguins, and penguins were the reason we came to this area. So, we decided to take the other popular tour that went to Punta Tombo, a couple hours South. When we bought the (expensive) ticket for the tour we were told that we would have an English speaking guide and would be able to stop off at a town where we could take a boat ride to see dolphins. We were both looking forward to seeing and learning about the dolphins and penguins. However, late Tuesday evening we were informed that the boat to see the dolphins was broken and the guide would be speaking (fast and not-understandable) Spanish and French, not English. We were stuck, being that it was late Tues and we were scheduled to leave early Wed.
On the two hour drive down to Punta Tombo we heard a lot of Spanish and French speaking, but learned nothing since we obviously couldn´t understand them. It was a bit frustrating because we were interested in knowing about the Magellan penguins. The penguin colony was great. There were thousands of penguins everywhere. We also saw a lot of llamas and some armadillos. We spent about 2 hours there, watching the penguins waddle on the ground and swim in the ocean. On our way out we bought our now mascot, Magellan the stuffed penguin (though we call him Mage -Ma hey- for short). After Punta Tombo we headed to an old Welsh community called Gaiman. It was a very cute area with a lot of Welsh character. However, we toured around and stopped at a few significant spots where we again got Spanish and French information on what there was to know. After walking through some of the town we stopped at a Welsh teahouse. When we walked in we thought we were in Wales... okay not really, but it had a great appearance of making one think so. They gave us food that could feed about 6 people, it included bread and butter, sandwiches, scones, tasty jam, and a few different kinds of pastries. And of course we had tea. It was all very yummy.
We left Gaimon and thought we were headed back to Puerto Madryn, but instead the minibus dropped us off at a museum in a town called Trelew. We weren´t interested in this museum, and we definitely weren´t interested in spending 15 pesos to get in. So we asked when we needed to be back and headed for the streets of Trelew (which there aren´t all that many). We first spotted a casino and thought that since we´d had soo much bad luck that maybe it would turn around in the casino. But when we tried to walk in, they tried to make us pay an entrance fee. A WHAT??? Unheard of. We walked back out. We wandered the streets and did a little shopping. We headed back to the museum, got on the bus and headed back to Puerto Madryn. We had a good time seeing everything that we saw, but we´d be lying if we said we weren´t disappointed that we didn´t learn what we could have.
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