Wow, lots to tell you today, particularly since this was the first time Michele and I split up and took separate tours to see different things. I’ll start with my experience, share some of Michele’s, and then tell you about our itinerary change.
We woke up to sun, wind and pleasantly cool temperatures in Puerto Madryn, a smaller city of about 94,000 residents on the coast of northern Patagonia in Argentina. One look out the cabin window also revealed that the landscape is vastly different than it was in Buenos Aires and points north. Gone is the lush greenery and humidity, replaced by an arid desert of low scrub and few small trees. My photos will give you a better idea than any description, so I’ll move on.
Puerto Madryn sits in an arc at the end of Golfo Nuevo, a huge bay, making it an ideal, sheltered port city, though the shallowness of the water at the city beaches requires a very, very long pier. In fact, the pier is so long that there is a shuttle to take cruise passengers from the ship to the end of the pier. One of the first things you notice is that the city is wrapped tightly around the coastline, and paved roads end just a few miles beyond the city limits. The population would probably be larger, but water is in short supply. Our guide told us it was more valuable than gold in this region. Puerto Madryn is not without rain, but on average receives only six to eight inches per year.
My tour bus took us southward out of the city, and shortly, as I said, we were on a dusty dirt road snaking our way along the coast to an overlook where we could watch a colony of sea lions basking in the sun. In much of this area the land ends abruptly at cliffs, and that was the case here, where a small beach at the bottom of the cliffs offers the sea lions excellent privacy. It’s often very windy here, with prevailing winds coming from the west, and today was no exception. I literally had to hold my hat on my head with one hand while trying to take photos with the other. We stayed for half an hour, and I had an opportunity to walk around a bit in the desert, which extends all the way to the shoreline. The bushes here may not be very high, but they have very deep roots as they work to find enough water to survive.
After our time viewing the sea lions we drove out through the desert on increasingly rough dirt roads to reach a sheep farm, where we learned about one of the important industries in this part of Patagonia. The highlight of our visit was watching one of the farmhands shear a sheep. The sheep was surprisingly docile during the process, and the owner explained that the sheep actually look forward to shearing because it makes them lighter and more comfortable, especially in the summer heat.
Afterwards, we were offered some traditional Argentinian snacks, and to my pleasant surprise I got to sample some maté. If you’ve read my previous posts you know that this traditional tea-like drink is made from crushed yerba maté leaves that are placed in a hollowed out calabash gourd. Hot water is then poured in, and the maté is drunk through a metal straw. I didn’t get to drink it in the traditional gourd, and a tea cup had to do, but it was real maté. My review? It really is a lot like tea, and I liked it, but I tend to like any drink that’s caffeinated.
After finishing our snacks and poking around the farm’s little gift shop for a few minutes we boarded the bus and returned to the ship by the same route we took to get out to the sea lion overlook and farm. I only mention the route we took because there is no other route. At least going south from the city, you run out of road pretty quickly.
While I headed south today, Michele’s tour took her north and then east onto Peninsula Valdés, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. She traveled farther than we did on our bus, and the paved road lasted longer before turning to dirt, but the big difference is that she saw more native wildlife in exchange for skipping a sheep farm. She saw sea lions, elephant seals, an armadillo, rheas (South American ostrich-like birds), guanacos (South American llamas), and the highlight, Magellanic penguins in the wild. One troubling thing we both saw was large numbers of a type of jellyfish that is rarely seen this far south, but warming water temperatures brought them down into the Golfo Nuevo.
We both enjoyed our tours, but there is news to report about our future itinerary, and it isn’t great. I mentioned yesterday that the forecast for our next destination, Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, calls for high winds on Thursday, our scheduled date of arrival. Stanley has no pier capable of docking large ships, so visiting means anchoring in the harbor and taking small boats to tender in. High winds would make that unsafe, and I speculated that we might have to skip the Falklands for that reason. Well, barely had I hit, “publish,” on yesterday’s post when the captain came on over the shipboard speakers to announce an itinerary change. Long story short, we’re going directly to Antarctica, in the hopes that by the time we finish there the weather will improve enough in the Falklands that we can go back, essentially doing the two destinations in reverse order. The captain is scheduled to speak to all of us at 12:45 tomorrow in the main theater, so hopefully we’ll learn more then.
A final word about the Internet before I sign off. The Internet has been terrific so far on our cruise, vastly better than anything we’ve ever experienced on prior cruises, and frankly about as good as at home. That’s largely the result of the ship using Starlink, and I’m much impressed. That being said, I have no idea how good the satellite coverage will be in Antarctica, so I’ll apologize in advance if at some point I’m incommunicado for a few days. In the meantime, stay tuned, and I’ll report back after the captain’s big briefing tomorrow.
Golfo Nuevo is a huge natural bay, with Puerto Madryn at the far end.
Sea lions basking in the sun on this protected beach under amazing cliffs.
Another view of the gorgeous Patagonian cliffs south of Puerto Madryn.
The desert starts right at the ocean.
Another view of the desert, beautiful in its own way.
Despite the fence, these are wild guanacos.
Michele saw this armadillo on her excursion.
Magellanic penguins in the wild. How cool.
Farmhand shearing a sheep on my tour.
After the sheep is sheared the wool is sorted and separated into large bins. I had no idea there could be different qualities of wool on the same sheep.
The wool sorting bins.
Our tour guide explaining how maté is served.
It wasn’t in a calabash gourd, but I got to try some maté, and I liked it.
Before leaving the sheep farm I got my photo taken with two of the residents.
We saw a lot of these jellyfish, which shouldn’t be this far south.
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