Well sadly we missed the Whales by 4 days. Orcas (Killer Wales to me) are about generally, but the big ones (Sperm I think) have now gone for the season. Still, by heading our to the Valdez Peninsular we should see elephant seals and penguins, and maybe an Orca.

The Valdez peninsular looks small on the map, just a little blob of land, but in reality a round trip to the west side and looping round and back from Puerto Madryn would be about 300km. The scale of everything down here is huge.

We set off about 9am, Guillermo came to see us off and warned us how to behave on the graded roads and we were away. Today was a bad weather day, the boats could not go out because of the high winds, but how bad could it be compared to what we had already been through?

The day started wet and cold, but soon warmed up, and within a short distance of leaving Madryn we are on a graded road. Wide and smooth, we liked it. Then we hit route 2 into the peninsular, which was back to tarmac. Apart from (there always seems to be an ‘apart from’) Chris’s sunglasses being torn from his face and dumped in the scrub, all went well. We did find his sunglasses, they were good ones. Ok now they are in more pieces than they were originally, but it will make them easier to pack.

A stop at the Interpretation centre to look at the little museum, and see the Whale skeleton and we were away. The entrance fee to the peninsular is 35 pesos each, but only for tourists – as that here is a lot of money. But anything to preserve this area is worth it.

The landscape continued like the mainland, flat, covered in scrub. A few scrawny sheep and a dead Alpaca is all we saw. Then as we neared our first port of call at Punto Cantor we saw an Alpaca running parallel with the car, then it cut across us. It is a much bigger and prettier animal than we thought, read and white fur, a fast and graceful runner. We saw a few more that day.

Penguins!  We stopped at a sign with a picture of a penguin and walked over to a fence to see if we could see any. They were almost at our feet and ignoring us totally. Scores of penguins, including a baby, were living their everyday lives in front of us. A lot of their lives includes blinking the grit out of their eyes, we could relate to that too.

Although you can never tire of penguins, we also wanted to see the elephant seals. So we headed up the road a few km to the viewing centre. Here there was a café and walkways down to a level above the beach. Here, as everywhere we stopped, you are not allowed to go onto the beach, as it would disturb the animals, but you are allowed pretty close.

We stayed walking and watching these huge animals for well over an hour. Young males fighting. Females with cubs. Leaving the group, coming in from the sea. It was all straight from the pages of a natural history book. Albatross-like birds (maybe), cormorants and others we can only guess at, flew round the sleeping giants.