Animal adventures in Argentina: Puerto Madryn
Those who have been reading this blog since we started our travels (almost a year ago!) know we had some disappointments on the way concerning animal encounters.
- Arrived to a town in Tasmania called Penguin just after all the penguins had left.
- Drove to a small town in New Zealand just for penguins – who weren’t there.
- Paid $400 AUD each to snorkel with whale sharks in Coral Bay, Western Australia. You guessed right – they were nowhere to be seen. Or actually just couple hundred kilometres North in Exmouth where we were couple of days earlier. Duh.
On a positive note, on that snorkel trip we did see everything else from manta & sting rays to whales, dugongs, more whales and dolphins.
And the greatest comeback was me fixing Richie up to get picked “randomly” from the audience of over a hundred people to feed dolphins in Monkey Mia in Western Australia. You should have seen the looks on the faces of all the kids and their parents when an almost two-meter tall twenty-something gets chosen for this cute activity!
Thus the stakes were quite high for our next Argentina stop. Puerto Madryn was always looming on the planning list but as it added a diversion to our route to Patagonia, we almost considered dropping it until we found out it was ORCA SEASON!
And not just any orca season, ORCAS SNATCHING SEA LION BABIES FROM THE BEACH season. You just don’t see this shit anywhere else in the world.
Could we be so lucky? Could the stars be aligned to make all this happen? For once being at the right place at the right time?
Well, no.
But I’ll come back to that later.
Puerto Madryn is the “base camp” for wildlife exploration in this area. You can see penguins (second biggest colony in the world, maybe now third as they found a new one in Antarctica), elephant seals, sea lions, Southern Ballena-whales, black-and-white dolphins (that look like mini orcas), regular dolphins, orcas, armadillos, local camels as we still call them (official name is guanaco), local emus, rabbits, pumas.. you name it.
You’ll need to either join quite expensive tours totalling $75-$100 USD / day or rent a car and drive and drive and drive to reach the animal spots. As we wanted more opportunities to spot the orcas, we rented a car and stayed inside the Peninsula Valdes National Park area to avoid paying the park entrance fee every day. On the first day though we drove to the opposite direction to Punta Tomba to check out the penguins, finally! During the drive there we joked half-heartedly about the possibility of no penguins. We figured that’d be our luck. Second biggest penguin colony without penguins.
Luckily we were wrong! It’s not exactly the advertised 400,000-500,000 penguins but enough to make us very, very happy. Until you have seen a penguin swim and bathe (they were clearly washing themselves by doing barrel rolls) you haven’t really experienced joy!
This successful first encounter made us hopeful for what was to come. Checking the National Park and Punta Norte Orca Research- Facebook pages, confirming high tide times, estimating driving times… orcas we are coming for you!
There’s two places where orcas are normally seen. Punta Norte which houses a sea lion colony and Cadeta Valdes with elephant seals, sea lions & an “attack channel” where only professional photographers and film crews can go. You are most likely to see these glorious predators during high tides and those are 1,5 hrs apart on these two places. Thus depending on the day you might get two high tides = better chances.
We spent the first day driving around and sitting in Cadeta Valdes. Talking to people who were on their third day of orca search with no results. But we also got our hopes up as a group of 15 orcas had been seen – just not at the usual spots but in a place were they haven’t been spotted in two years. So they were definitely around..
Second day’s first high tide was at 7.30 am in Punta Norte. We had to start the drive at 6am to make it through the gravel roads with our white Ford Fiesta – not exactly the same as driving with our Toyota Landcruiser 4WD in Australia…
Then we waited. And waited. Watched sea lion pups play at the water. Thinking if it’s disturbed to hope a predator would come and eat them? And really hope for that?
No orcas.
It was time to switch location back to Cadeta Valdes to wait for the 17.45pm high tide. Only 8hrs to go. We are pretty good at the waiting game when Kindles are fully charged and you have a place in the shade. Eating self-made sausage sandwiches and yesterday’s pasta cold, buying hot water to make your own coffee (did I already tell you Argentina is expensive?), gazing at the sea, hoping to see a black fin or two emerge from the water.
Eight hours later, cold and wet from sitting in the rain for the last hour, it was time to admit defeat and head back to the base camp while there was still sunlight left.
No orcas.
When I am a famous writer I’ll come back for a month to live in a hut with views to the sea. Write and wait for the intelligent black and white friends to show up. Until then the Youtube clips and documentaries are all we have.
Night terrors at Fjordland
They say New Zealand has it all. And now I have started to understand this statement a little better. So far, we have seen mountain scenery you could experience in the European Alps, walked on empty beaches with waves ready to be surfed and driven through thick forests and Windows XP-green hills.
What else could this country have, isn’t this already enough for 4,7 million people?
Fjords. You know, those things that Norway is really proud of. Only to find out that someone is better at branding than them and calls their fjord “the Eight Wonder of the World”. Milford Sound is maybe the most famous fjord in the world so Norway you’d need to step up your game a bit. Or stop being so expensive, either would work.
The drive to Milford sound is beautiful and has those famous wheat-colored fields that make such a good “hey look at me walking casually in the middle of tickling crops while stepping into mud and god knows what”- Instagram moments. I had just tried to describe to Insta-clueless Richie the perfect field-photo he would need to take when we spotted the perfect field – with about 20 others trying to take that same photo.
Knee-high at its best...
The crops weren’t that high though – or I am just taller than an average travel blogger/Instagrammer? – so my photos don’t really convey the vision we had. Richie the Art Director told me to gallop, run and jump graciously and I tried with not-so-photogenic results. I guess you need to take 100 photos to get one good shot, right?
After the mandatory photo session, we found our camping spot and did a weekly cleaning. I say weekly but up until now that is the only time we have done it. While all the doors were open, a little friend flew in. I remembered the Kea warnings and was sure it was going to steal everything it possibly could and tried to make loud noises and gestures (that’s also how I speak sometimes) and a tiny black bird came out. It wasn’t afraid of us at all, hid under the car and tried to go back in at every opportunity it got. As it wasn’t the evil Kea, I didn’t care that much and we finished cleaning.
And the night came….
Camping spots are usually pitch-black dark unless you are in a holiday park. Here we were also the furthest away from any buildings or other cars.
We were watching our daily dose of Modern Family when I heard a weird sound. Like someone really small trying to knock on our car. Possibly nothing, continued watching the show. Until we heard that and weird digging-through-our-car noise. I was starting to freak out, sure of that the evil Keas had come and they had a master plan to destroy us.
Richie went for a look outside, didn’t see a thing nor any marks on the car.
But the noise continued, only stopped when we knocked the trunk door back. This went on until it was time to sleep and I opted for ear plugs since ignorance is bliss. I woke up couple of times during the night time hearing the same noises so this wasn’t the most relaxed night.
Surprisingly the next morning there were no signs of our night guests. No marks in the car, nothing. Explanation came when the friendly ranger told that the robins (the tiny friend who tried to sneak into our car) like to eat the insects off the car. What a relief!
Foggy morning drive to Milford Sound
Now that the night terror mystery was solved we could head off to our Milford Sound cruise in peace. The prices for the cruises are usually $80+ but thanks to bookme-site we got ours $40 each. Waterfalls, fog, more waterfalls and then to Richie’s great joy, closer look at sea lions! And after that, playful dolphins. Take that Norway, I bet you don’t have fjord dolphins?!
(By the way, the popular Live-stream of a Finnish freshwater seal, saimaannorppa, is coming back this May. Tune in here https://wwf.fi/en/norppalive/. In previous years we have watched a seal mostly sleep and turn, named it Pullervo ("tubby" could be the closest translation) and saw it finding a partner. People had their second screen at work tuned into Norppa-Live all day.)
As the weather wasn’t the best we skipped a longer Gertrude Saddle walk and chose Lake Marian track instead. 1,5 hours climbing in a muddy path in the forest and at the end you are rewarded with a beautiful mountain lake. This put our hiking shoes to a true test and we survived all the mud! Lululemon active wear pants didn’t though and this was the moment we started to plan the next item in our path-to-become-hikers- purchase list.
From all the places we’ve seen in NZ so far I’d spend more time in Milford Sound and spend that time on multi-day hikes such as the Milford, Routeburn or Kepler track. Too bad you need to book these super-popular routes well in advance, the booking opens now for next summer..
But also, seeing all this makes you also appreciate what is close to home. Lapland and Northern Norway was the destination for our childhood trips and only know you come to realize how beautiful and unique those places are. Norway the Eight Wonder, Milford Sound the 9th ;)
All the roads are gravel
Driving around New Zealand does not always make sense. Our previous spot, the Mt. Cook village, was just on the other side of the mountain range and in the West you’d have the famous glaciers – Franz Josef and Fox Glacier - where we would be going later after a looong detour on the East coast.
The east coast in our dreams meant animal encounters – penguins, seals, maybe dolphins and even whales.. but of course all these are season dependent. As we have learned many times by now, it is not the penguin season. Apparently, no-one knows what penguins do or where they go after they have raised their babies at the shore. One sign said they sleep in the ocean. The theory of relativity was finalised 101 years ago but we still don’t know where the penguins go!
We didn’t spend a lot of time in Dunedin, just enough to drive through the city twice as I missed a well-hidden turn to a super cheap auto store and we had to go all around again. Now we don’t need to try to sneak into hostels to charge our electronics as we have a power inverter. Unfortunately this has meant that as the Mac is always charged, we can spend way too much time watching shows during dark nights at the camping grounds since there is nothing else to do.. (Read?! I think I had to read a lot this year. Next night then.)
Tunnel Beach near Dunedin was our first stop and since it was already 10am, it was more than appropriate time for ice cream! There are small shops selling real-fruit ice-cream scattered around NZ and it is delicious.
This day was meant to be one of those ones where you drive a bit and stop a lot. My planning notes said we could do everything from Tunnel Beach to Slope Point with multiple stops in between in a day but as we have learned, my planning can’t always be trusted.
Drive to Nugget Point Lighthouse takes up surprisingly lot of time as you need to drive there and back on a slow curly road. But it was worth it – we saw sea lions! About 300m away and they were mostly brown lumps that moved a bit… but still!
Someone is extremely happy after our first animal encounter!
Now the time was already past 2pm and it wasn’t long before dark. So we decided to skip both Purakaunui Falls and Cathedral Caves and drive straight to somewhere near Slope point to camp. Only to be tempted to drive 25km one-way on a gravel road for the possible promise of close-by sea lion encounters at Jackson Bay. We walked the whole beach, almost lost Richie in the fog, saw some monstrous sea weed trunks but no sea lions.
Now we were kind of in a rush and the gravel roads just continued. To add to this, destiny threw another obstacle on our route – bridge renovation and a detour. We were directed to drive through the middle of the thick Catlin forests and I don’t think any other backbacker has driven through that Fanghorn-type of silently threatening forest. The thickness of that jungle-like view was astounding and it would have been quite an adventure to go and wonder between the trees. Only problem is that I’m not sure if you could get in, the green walls surrounding us were so thick.
Catlins forest
After a very long time we finally got out and were approaching Slope Point camping area, now we just had to navigate based on the map as there we hadn’t had phone service in the past 3 hours. That was also awesome because I had no idea what there was at Slope Point because my plan notes did not say anything else than “Slope Point”. Luckily we found the camping spot and asked other smart people around who enlightened us that is the Southernmost part of New Zealand we could visit the next morning.
And so we did!
