Heading north…

…ON THE ARGENTINIAN SIDE (for now) – PUERTO MADRYN

Having got to Cape Horn (Chile) and Ushuaia (Argentina) the only non-Antarctic way is north. But north-west to Calafate or north-east to Puerto Madryn? We’d seen many glaciers so far, but marine life had been more elusive, so we flew to Trelew (deciding it preferable to c.36hrs of buses) and bussing the remaining 50 miles to Puerto Madryn and the Valdes peninsular. A peninsular tour to see sea lions, a small colony of penguins, and to access the whale watching, along with the actual whale watching boat trip, were duly booked. There is much that could be said, but nothing speaks like photos…

Our tour of the peninsular had been with a guide in a car and intended for 4 people – but it was only booked by us, so a private tour! The guide was so knowledgable and enthusiastic about his subject that when he mentioned a possible further tour to Isla Escondida – home to a colony of elephant seals for only 2 months of the year, and on to Punta Tombo; where a huge colony of Magallenic penguins nest we jumped at the chance. At this time of year the penguins have finished breeding and are incubating their eggs. Again, it would be just us two and in a car, rather than with 14 others in a minibus – hard to refuse and once again, the photos say much more than we ever could.

TO AND FROM NEUQUEN

And so after a fantastic hit of Patagonian wildlife we left Puerto Madryn, heading north-west to Neuquen. Keen to avoid, as much as possible, any repetition of a journey, we had hoped to cross the border across the Andes back into Chile at Pino Hachado heading for Temuco, then via Chillan up to Santiago. Neuquen is ideally placed to be able to do this. However, it turned out that the frequency and availability of connections would sadly not fit with our remaining time in South America, and the buses we needed would mean too long a stop between each.

Nonetheless, we took the opportunity to explore Neuquen whilst we re-planned our onward route. Although not high on any travelling agenda we had seen Neuquen was a nice enough place to give us a flavour of more ‘normal’ Argentina. Relatively new, first colonised in the late 1800s and officially founded in 1904 it seems a relatively wealthy, small city, nestled in the valley where the Neuquen and Limay Rivers converge. Two nights here allowed us to unwind a little from our exciting south Atlantic and wildlife adventures, wandering wide leafy avenues to admire the gentle scenery of the rivers and valley. A small museum gave us an insight into the city’s history, the building of a railway from Buenos Aires to Neuquen, and the allocation of land (previously the preserve of the indigenous peoples) to a wealthy few, for the development of the area – an often repeated story, it seems. It also really brought home to us how recent the development of the whole area really is and the ‘youth’ of the country as a whole

Given lack of options to head west, from Neuquen we really only had one direction to go – north to Mendoza and across the Andes from there. We had always said we would be very happy to return to Mendoza, even if only briefly, so we boarded yet another bus for yet another long journey (13+ hrs) and whiled away the time enjoying the gradually changing, gentle scenery of the pampas, and marvelling over the incredibly bad road surface which on occasion was worse than roads we had encountered in South East Asia. Despite this being a developed country and the road being a national route, it was astonishingly bad for many miles.