Having a whale of a time!

The main attraction in Puerto Madryn and surrounding areas is the wildlife. At different times of the year they have orcas, penguins, seals, sea lions, dolphins, and the main attraction for this time of year, whales. The whales generally arrive mid-May and stay in the gulf around the peninsula.

I had booked a tour with another Irish girl also in the hostel (which is very quiet at the moment!) and we left with our tour guide/driver at 8am. We were the only two on the tour, so a pretty personalised service...

First stop was the beach about half an hour away from Puerto Madryn where you can see whales from the shore. The sun was just rising and we caught a glimpse of some of the whales from quite a distance.

There might be a whale somewhere in this photo. Or maybe not. Think that's an Argentine sea gull there though. And the sunrise was pretty dramatic!

At this point the road turns more into a gravel path and the ride got a bit bumpy. At the entrance to the peninsula we had to part with 130 pesos to enter and continued to the visitor centre.

Very close encounter with a whale

After a quick trip round the visitor centre (not a whole lot to do, but some interesting info on the history of the area), it was another half an hour or so drive to where we were going to do the whale watching boat. One thing that struck me driving through the land was just how dry it is. I think with the Patagonia association with sheep, I imagined more rolling countryside with white polka-dot sheep against a lush green background. In reality it's more like this...

Desert. And this is the most dramatic part of the landscape, the rest of it is flat flat flat

There are farms on the peninsula and Merino sheep are the animal generally farmed here. Observing the lack of grass (or real greenery) I asked how big the farms were, and it turns out they are generally huge (into the thousands of hectares), but with a sheep capacity of about 1 sheep to 2.5 hectares. I'm no livestock expert, but wikipedia's insightful "livestock grazing comparison" article leads me to believe in the UK,10 sheep per hectare would be reasonable from average productivity land, suggesting the farming land is 25x more productive than in Patagonia.

Anyway, pedantry on sheep grazing aside, the next stop was the whale watching itself. This was also the point where I realised that I was not wearing nearly enough, despite having a good number of layers on. Anyway, for the sake of once-in-a-lifetime proximity to some of the world's greatest mammals, I shivered my way onto the boat with the 10 other passengers for the 90 minute voyage in search of some whales.

Turns out, the whales aren't hard to find (they are pretty big, hang around near the surface of the water, swim slowly, and don't really mind it when the boats loiter next to them). All in all, making them pretty fine photo opportunities. In Patagonia the whales are the Southern Right Whale. No one's yet to find a wrong whale, but Moby Dick apparently knew of a true whale. More seriously, rumour has it that the name comes from the fact that they were easy to hunt, for much the same reasons mentioned above as to why they are good to go on a watching tour to see.

His belly or his back? No idea. Impressive sedimentary rock formations in the background! Rocks rock!

Well know whale past-time. Who can get their nose further out of the water?

The Whales have crustaceans that live on their skin, which are a unique marker.

So, the whales were pretty awesome and made up for the fact that we were freezing on the boat. I was still pretty pleased to get back to dry land and have a coffee.

After the whales we stopped by a sea lion colony to say hi before driving back home. One last treat as we drove past the beach was a whale and her baby (only a few days old) swimming next to the shore.

The dots on the rocks are sea lions. I promise.