See Sea(lions), Si!

At 2pm on my last full day in P. Madryn I strolled nervously down to Scuba Duba where I donned a suit made of rubber. While no farmers from the midwest were involved I was still pretty nervous. (For those in the dark - during my summer working as a door-to-door salesman in the states my hard-sell approach got me into a scrape with some farmers who were very much into wearing S&M and fetish gear). I´d not dived for four or five years and couldn´t remember what the bejesus the rules were or how to use the kit. The guy in the shop, Santiago, assured me all would be well and so I waddled across the road to join Bruno and, the ships captain, Carolina on the beach.

On the journey out to Punta Loma I was shown some caves where the Welsh settlers had used to cosy up in when they arrived, told some history of the Southern Sea Lion colony we were about to visit and some information on the boat. Despite my insistence there was prescious little information about how to use Scuba gear. What I did get was a quick run through of "this does that, that does this, run if you see a shark!". As the ship had dropped anchor I could see we were close to the colony, but I had no idea if they would come into the water nor what they would be like - playful and fun or a bit shirty.

It was with some trepidation that I put on my mask, flippers and tank and tumbled backwards into the icy cold water. Once I got my breath back and got the old BCD inflated I waited for Bruno (the only other person on the dive with me) before we descended beneath the waves. The visibility was pretty good and I was starting to get used to the equipment and to adjust to being under the waves. However, the lower we went the more I felt like I was in the middle of a horror film. Out of the corner of my eye I could see flashes of movement but when I turned my head to look there was nothing there in the gloom. I felt some genuine fear and started to wonder why they were called sea LIONS.

We got to the bottom (about 6m) and found a flat leafy patch to sit and suddenly we were surrounded by several sleek and swift bullets of blubber. My eyes nearly popped out of their sockets at what I was seeing before me and I kept forgetting to breath such was my amazmenet. They were beautiful and elegant with massive eyes and long whiskers that gave them the appearance of a soggy labrador begging for food at the dinner table. At first I was pretty nervous, but I mellowed as their curiosity and proximity increased. I reached out to touch one and it nibbled at my fingers with its sharp dirty teeth. I could also feel them nibbling at my head, arms and legs. (I had been told to expect this as its kinda how they communicate).

Suddenly, after a few minutes of us getting to know each other, a shadow descended on us and I looked up and saw a bloody enourmous submarine of a Sealion - at least 4 times bigger and meaner and darker looking than the ones playing with us. I looked at Bruno and he gave the handsignals for "Male" and then for "lets give it flippers out of here". We swam on for 10 or 15m and the smaller sea lions followed us and we carried on messing about, however, it wasn´t long before the big man was back making sure were weren´t messing with is harem. We moved on again and the Alpha males tailed us, so after about a total of 35 minutes down there with them we ascended to the surface. At the top many of them broke the surface and looked a bit miffed we weren´t playing anymore, but with the big grey blur still below us it was time to go back to the boat. Plus, I was bloody freezing.

Back on the boat, satisfied no doubt that we were buggering off, I could see the males drag his big fat ass back onto the rocks. As Carolina fired up the boat and I slurped on some hot chocolate I looked into the water and could see loads of them at the surface looking a like a playful pup waiting for you to throw a stick, but who knows that you´ve already turned for home. I gave them a little wave goodbye and grinned, my mind blown, as we gunned it back to shore.

Some Snaps

Wales

Monday Dec 3rd saw Em (a girl from Leicester) and me head to the "welsh" towns of Dolovan, Gaiman and Trelew. These towns were where the welsh settlers had set up camp after leaving their homeland because of getting throughly fed up with the disappointing attitude from the brits.

It had a been billed as a very welsh thing and lots of welsh tea houses and yadda yadda yadda, but, as Brits, we were naturally a bit disapointed.

The tea and cake we had was ok, but the bread was stale, boyo, (and believe me i know stale bread), there were no bloody people speaking bloody welsh and no one doing welsh jigs nor tom jones...

The touristy crap aside, the best thing was seeing the left over welsh genes knocking about. We saw a little red headed welsh looking girl with a thick spanish accent... tho i think what we were expecting was very argentine looking people with thick welsh accents. heh ho

my brother

There were many day trippers on the bus back to P-Madryn - all in highspirits and drunk on the sun, salty sea air and rum.

It turns out that they´re fairly strict about where you sit on buses and i found my tired body was next to a local man of about 45, a goatee beard, long grey hair, leathery tanned skin and not too many teeth through which whistled the stale smell of booze. He started speaking in very rapid slangy slurred spanish but we managed to agree that i was from england and that he was from paraguay, but worked on a construction site in P.Madryn.

He then got quiet excited and said that we were brothers. "¿por que?" I asked not warming to the idea. He then said something i didn´t catch in spanish. "no entiendo" i said regretfully thinking i should have have just smiled agreeably not wanting this happy drunk to turn aggressive. What he meant then became obvious as he said, loudly, first in english and then, for the benefit of the mainly argentine passengers, in spanish: "Because we both hate the argies and love to kill them!".

I hope my pleas of "No Yo, Senor! No Yo!" carried around the bus but i think it may have been drowned out by the noise he made to accompany his mime of shooting uzis in the air like a mexican bandit...

I very quickly shoved on some music and feigned sleep. When waking from the real thing as we arrived in P.Madryn I noticed my brother had had the boistriouness bounced out of him on the bumpy road back. There was a slimy trail down his front that culminated in a puddle of sick at his feet. Miraculously there was not a drop on me or my rucksack - cheers, bro.

Whales

So, once aboard the good ship ´HydroSport´ we were warned by el Captain that we may have a bit of a wait on our hands. I was mentally preparing myself for an hour or two to wait. It´s the end of the season for the Southern Right Whale here in P.Madryn and most of them have already headed south to Antartica for the summer. However, after only 20 minutes the captain pointed off the starboard side - looking over I could see nothing but waves and a set of sleepy Sealions resting on the rocks.

Then all of a sudden rising out of the water came the biggest living thing i shall probably ever see. It was incredible. Majestic. Beautiful. I even gasped and swore in english, spanish and german. Then junior (as big as a bloody big car) turned up for a nosey.


I´m told that these were the last the last left in town and I feel very lucky just to have seen them. However, many other people I spoke to just saw them swimming around and blowing their blow holes, but while we were out there they started leaping out of the water and doing the whole splashing around thing. Holy Shit /Merde / Sheisser!! My photos do it no justice, of course, but it was remarkable and quite quite special I can tell you.


We spent about 45 minutes following them and then sadly returned to Terra Firma (oh - yeah - Terra means land and Torres means Towers... thats been bugging me for days nows).

In Patagonia...

"You´re not looking for a job, I suppose?" Milton Evans asked. It was lunchtime and he presented me with a slab of meat on the end of a small sword.
"Not particularly."
"Funny, you remind me of Bobby Dawes. Young Englishman, same as yourself, wandering around Patagonia. One day he walks up to an estancia and says to the owner: ´If you give me work, you´re a saint, and you´re wife´s a saint, and your children are angels, and that dog´s the best dog in the world.´But the owner syas, ´There is no work.´´In which case´ Bobby says, ýou´re the son of a whore, your wife is a whore, your children are both monkeys, and if i catch that dog, I´ll kick it´s arse till its nose bleeds.´"

Thanks to Bobby Bowley for the tipping me off about Bruce Chatwins excellent book - In Patagonia. Its a fine read even if you´ve no intentions of heading to this amazing land... For me it´s made me laugh a fair bit and added a lot of colour and history to some of the unexpected elements of Argentina (e.g. Welsh people, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Bobby Dawes).

I´m getting to the Whales....

So, Puerto Madryn is big news not because its a crappy town with the big pier but because of what´s to see and do in Peninsular Valdes. This huge spit of land is home to many lovely plants and animals. The number of tour operators in P. Madryn might well equal the total sum of wildlife, but I shunned them all and as an independent traveller I travlled independently to the main town (if you can call it that) on P.Valdes - Puerto Pyramides.

After casing the joint for the best whale watching deal I started chatting to a very cool Czech guy - Jirka - who was travelling properly independently with only a tent and his wits. He laughed at my "very english humour" and we shared nightmares over living near Basingstoke (he had been a handy man for a retired Colonel near doughnut city to fund his trip). Like a good Douglas Coupland novel he could sum things up (in this case the trials and tribulations of being on the road) with wry accuracy and a good line in humour. He shared with me some fine tips and, after we parted like old friends, I felt like I should buy a tent and a sleeping bag and rough it a bit.. which i still haven´t done, tho he has encourgaed me a few times by e-mail since.

other stuff on Bs As

So - just quickly then:

- beer - stella is delicacy here - go figure. quilmes, a fairly decent local brew, has pretty much cornered the market here tho...
- going out - it seems that argentines don´t go out for a night out until about 1am and parties aren´t pumping until about 3 or 4. nuts. i´ve tried a couple of times - oh how i´ve tried- but almost always need to pass out at about 3.30...must be my age... btw - have i mentioned that i was accused of having a mid-life crisis by some stuck up little 22yr old madam from england? when i was her age i had a bit more respect for my elders i can tell you. kids today....


so anyway - yes - three weeks in Bs As studying spanish (well kinda... the last week and a haf was a bit sow and i maybe didn´t give it my full attention...which i´m regretting now) and i was mad keen to get out of the city. kinda thankfully the ady running the homeess shelter i´m gonna help at was busy for teh couple of days i was gonna head there, so i changed my plans of boozing in the big city and booked a ticket for puerto madryn... which i´ve already mentioned i think...

anyway - yeah. Puerto madryn was like a flipping ghost town when i arrived at mid afternoon. I checked into my hostel which was,again,like a zombie virus had swept through a week before. i went for a walk along this holidays first beach and then along the town pier (to see my 2nd big flag of the trip - tho madrids big flag can sleep easy for now) when i came back to shore the town was FULL UP and bustling. it was a bit freaky. anyway. it turns out everyone who goes to puerto madryn goes there for day trips and not for the town....

bugger... i´ve run out of time again. i´m now in chile (i´ve been to Ushuaia since my last post) and am in punta arenas and am heading for punta natales to do some 4 day walk round some montains. the place is called torres del paines.... i know that torres is land, but i hope paines doesn´t mean pain..... i´m not sure if i really am the outdoor type...

Btw - i´ve not had a cigarette for 5 days now... which is odd becuse i was smoking like a bloody chimney for the first month and sounded like i´d borrowed pat butchers larynx.

The greatest sandwich ever

just so you can sleep easy, sndthry. the pre-sealion sandwich was the best i´ve ever had and easily gets in the top three sandwhiches of all time. sure you get jamon y queso the world over, but the bread here was just the right side of stale, you could tell the processed ham had ben steamed of the bones with love and the weight of melted cheese was greater than my mochila / rucksack. i´ve had nightmares for a week.

mmmmm...

Bs As

So yes, before i get up-to-date I shall share a quick overview of Buenos Aires.

Folk
Portenos are ace people it turns out. Very friendly, convivial and like a good laugh. But not as much as they like dogs. Of which there are kazillions and, consequently, bazillions of pro dog walkers exercising 10 at once. I saw a fight between the dogs of two rival dog walkers - very funny to see the humans getting dragged down the street as the hounds took flight for a royal rumble. However, no-one likes picking up dog poo very much. My trainers have collected some soveniurs along the way. in Argentina they also love the Mullets and Rat Tails here - no two haircuts are the same. They also like beards so I fitted in fine (NB: in my folly i left my beard trimmers at home so i made my spanish teacher write down very clear instructions that i could read out to Barbers to get my facial folicles trimmed... it worked too...tho its a little bit sculpted like a "Just For Men" advert).

Getting about
The aforementioned subway system is good and cheap (just over 10p to go where you want) and taxis abound (again fairly cheap, but it can be expensive if they give you the ´tour´or pull the old "that´s a fake 50" trick). However, my favourite mode of transport was the Collectivios (buses). They´re brilliant. They have, I kid you not, about 1000 different routes. The buses of each route have they´re own colours with the drivers ties reflect the team strip. Again they cost about 10p and, not that I´ve turned into a Bus Spotter, if i was forced to choose the best route i would have to settle on the 152. Dedo Arriba!

One thing that did cross my mind was how screwed this enourmous city would be if / when we all run out of petrol. I think our grey haired friend above might, instead, be waving his middle finger about (with his 152 tie round his head as he loots an electronics shop). Still, at least the stinking fumes would vanish.

Cultural differences / stuff
Men kiss each other goodbye. Thanks to the infinite wit and wisdom of Rob Andrews I understand why (back in the day you´d complement folk or pass on secret messages and stuff). Which is fine...except I wasn´t really expecting, as i said goodbye to a Porteno friend, to have a peck planted on my cheek. That or i´d gone in the wrong kind of bar and had a dose of Rehypnol slipped in my drink and he thought i was out of it.

They love a good protest - nearly everyday there was some group or other having a pop at the government in the main square (no posties that i could spot, tho, mum). The most moving one of all tho is the weekly (Thursdays at 3.30pm) protest by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Very moving stuff...

ummm... i´m out of time. I´m in Puerto Madryn at the moment and have to get a quick bite to eat before i do a scuba dive thing with some sealions. Can´t wait - i have a feeling this could be one of the highlights of the trip...