I'M AT: Hostel Choiques, Puerto Madryn. Cheap, bit scraggy, Claudio the jefe is a brilliant geezer, forced me to speak castellano while we all played cards over a beer. The place was full of 18-year-old students, full of pride at their home town, Santa Cruz, which was to me just a name on a motorway sign when we headed South.
So, we're in Patagonia. It deserves its own section, I feel, because it's markedly different in culture, climate and landscape to the rest of Argentina.
For a start, the East coast is almost entirely featureless. Low bushes squat, in their millions, over a gravelly soil, for thousands of miles. We saw the ocassional weatherworn sheep. That was about it, for twenty hours, at 90kph.
Secondly, the recent history and thus ancestry of the current residents is quite different. The place was settled by the religious and the brave. Madryn itself was settled in the 1860s by a group of Welshmen, who sought solace from England's tyranny and a place in which to develop their beliefs. After establishing the port, they moved pretty quickly to the valleys of the Chubut River. They founded the cities of Gaiman, and Trelew, and Rawson, which remain pretty Welsh today, even if your man on the omnibus, Lewis Jones, speaks only castellano. You can go for a Welsh high tea in Trelew. We didn't.
And thirdly, Patagonia is different because it's a lot, lot more touristy than the rest of the country. Initially divided by Northern Europeans into massive sheep ranches, much of the place is now state-owned, and the population live from the tourist pocket. This is no bad thing, but it means that national culture is a bit thin on the ground here, and you could easily be in Europe, or North America.
Anyway. Puerto Madryn is visited because of its proximity to Peninsula Valdes, an area of land jutting into the cold Atlantic, blessed with some of the best coastal wildlife in the world - seals, sealions, penguins, Commerson's dolphins, killer whales, and the highlight of our visit, the Southern Right Whale. The elephant seals that feed and fight and fuck here do so in complete ignorance to the fact that they are the only ones in the world to do so. Mostly, they sit around, entombed in a blubbery landscape.
And so we saw the penguins topple and clown their way to the sea, and sit on hatching eggs, and it was nice and all. And then we went on a boat trip out to the dolphins, which are coloured just like killer whales, but much smaller, they zip and twing through the waters. Really very fast, and pretty elusive. I didn't think the boat was going fast enough to amuse them.
The Southern Right Whales, however, were just - spectacular. We paid a bit more to go out on a semi-rigid boat, which meant there were only 14 of us in the launch, and we could chop across the water much more quickly than the bigger craft. As a result, we made it right into the heart of a group of nursing whales. The pups are curious, and came across to swim right under the boat. They're huge. And they're just the nippers. The mums are a bit more placid, sticking a barnacled head out of the water to let off low sonar rumbles.
And everyone was very pleased because we managed to capture the Money Shot. The whales occasionally rest vertically in the swell, with their blueblack tails raised out of the water, and on this occasion we were lucky, the motor was cut and we drifted round the enormous tail, glistening in the morning light. Just beautiful, and very moving, and I felt stupid and hot and complex next to these graceful beasts.
But they do lack fingers with which to type.
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