PUERTO MADRYN and PENINSULA VALDÉS

Current location:  click here

The Valdes Peninsula is an important nature reserve, listed by UNESCO as World Heritage site. The peninsula is breeding and birth place for seals, sea lions, elephant seals and magellanic penguins. In winter (from May to Nov) baleen whales may be seen too. 

But perhaps the most espectacular visitors are Orcas, a dolphin mistakenly called Killer whales. These hunters usually visit the peninsula between Feb and April, when baby seals are doing their first attempts in the sea. They have being filmed intentionaly beaching themselves temporarily to grab their pray.
Following photos are from the flight from Ushuaia and Puerto Madryn. It was a Fokker 28 plane belonging to the Argentinean Air Force. Take Offs and Landing were done as I have seen in other military flights: as vertical as possible, with a 90º turn during the final approach before landing.

One interesting discovery at the La casa de Tounens hostel :)  But there were no chips to play :(

The most remarkable in Puerto Madryn were perhaps some of the seafood restaurants, but coming from further south this didn't impress me that much.

The next day I join an australian couple and Orly, an israeli young lady for a tour to Peninsula Valdes. We started at 8am in Puerto Madryn and drove the 100km to the Parks entrance. From there we visited the north half of the Peninsula. We saw lots of seals, sea lions and elephant seals as well as magellanic
penguins.

The sea was very calm, we had high tide and the baby seals where playing happily at the beach. These are the perfect conditions for a Killer whale attack I was told; we waited for about an hour. We left then as the tide was already lowering without seeing an attack. But not only the attack was missing, we didn't see any whales around; and the weather was so nice that they couldn't hide from us.

Fortunately, Guanacos, dwarf armadillo, rheas, maras are some of the other animals that can be seen too. And we swa many of them.

One last discovery before leaving the peninsula was that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, lived in this area for some years and there is one island where locals say it inspired Exupéry to one of the drawings in his book.

The hostel I was staying at was very clean and the people there very friendly. We had however the police on-site on one of the evenings, looking for two young men who had just checked-in. They were searched as well as their luggage and a bunch of electronic, women and baby articles were found together with the receptionist' cell phone (she's the one that called the police). Good these guys didn't stay more than a few minutes in the place.