Trelew & Penisula Valdes
Trip Start
Dec 29, 2007
1
5
6
Trip End
Jan 28, 2008
Trelew, Argentina
Monday, January 28, 2008
We came to Trelew for 2 reasons, for the Penisula Valdes national park and for the dinosaur museum.
First thing off the bus we got ourselves some food then rented a car. Punting it up that afternoon to Penisula Valdes in the hope to see some ocras (killer whales), no luck though. Penisula Valdes is a little bit of land sticking out of the main land and attracts a lot of sea mammals to it. In the winter time is it a place where whales could be watched but unfortunately we had not hit it this time of year.
Instead on our various stops along the coast line we got to see a huge colony of sea lions just lazying out of the beach! Occasionally there would be a lot of noise between a couple of the males, making territory and their females around them. There were so many of them on the beach, with their young but most of the time being lazy bums! Further down the coast we got to see some more of our good friends, the magallenus penguins, although by this time of year their young were were a lot bigger than when we were coming down on the Marco Polo, about 3/4 the size of their parents with most of their fur looking nearly ready to go, but dam hungry buggers! Was cute to see these guys again.
Further down we got to see some elephant seals, these guys were so lazy they were not doing anything, far less of them but still about 30 - 40 of them on the beach. From what we could see, there was only 1 male, these guys are 9 times heavier than a male sea lion, so they are about 4 tonnes !!
With the sun coming into set, we heading into Puerto Pyramids to stay for the night which was inside of the national park. Leaving the next morning I finally got to see some of their emu like birds, just hanging around the road as we drove past!
The dinosaur museum back in Trelew was pretty cool, it was made up of original dinosaur bones on display, some had been placed to show what the dinosaur would have looked like and others just left as they were found. These bones were from all over Argentina and they had a great variety on display, was really cool and some were massive too!
All in all it was a quality 26 hours spent in this section of Argentina!
