Puerto Madryn

We returned to Buenos Aires for another night in the Ayacucho Palace and another enormous BA steak supper and then set off to the beautiful port of Puerto Madryn.
This horseshoe bay is approximately 1500kms south from BA and is where 60 Welsh settlers came ashore in 1865 on rowing boats from the ¨Mimosa¨ to start a new life in Argentina. They dug cave holes out of the sandstone shore to make shelters and lived like this for six months before they moved 60kms south as they found no true source of water and the barren land grew little for them to eat. There is a monument to the Welsh founders of Puerto Madryn on the southern point of the bay and the original cave holes still survive and are protected today. So this is the point where the Welsh association with Patagonia begins and we went in search of Welsh tea rooms in Trelew and Gaiman later in the stay. Very tasty and more cakes you could shake a leek at!
Puerto Madryn is still a town in the making as so many places in the south are but is a popular tourist destination as home to the highly recommended natural wildlife reserve of Peninsula Valdes. The promise of orca´s berthing at high tide to catch themselves a baby seal supper was on one hand gruesome but only other side Blue Planet in the flesh! Seal rookeries and lanuid penguins basking in the sun were so close that the fishy smell was quite potent!
To the north of PM the coast runs for miles, utterly deserted with Seal colonies dotted along at various points. Next cafe stop....Punta Arenas. To the north of PM is the wannabe-island of the Peninsular Valdes. Confusing the connected land mass for an island..seal colonies and birds prefer islands allegedly (Like the English)..they stop off here to breed. Spending 90 percent of their time in the water they still breed and rear their young on land - for the 3 months or so of the pups life (without a private bed or midwife). The Pups suckle their mums to skin and bones, the mothers losing 40 percent of their body weight in this period and the pups get correspondingly larger..do the math! There is also the biggest disparity in size between the male and female of any species, the males being up to 10 times the size of the female - this doesn´t decrease the females ability to spend the husbands bonus let it be said.
The peninsular is teeming with other wildlife, cormorants, shags, penguins, Choique (emu style birds), Caranco (large birds of prey) and herds of Guanaco galloping majestically across the pampas to name a few. Colonies of penguins live on the very unforgiving Spit, Calveta Valdes that runs N/S on the edge of the island. They live, breed and fish from the stony shoreline and more surprisingly live in burrows towards the tops of the cliffs.
In Puerto Pirmides we all took to a boat captained by the Thompson Twins, two salty young sea-dogs who with flowing black hair and 8.30 shadows but with insatiable charm (and knowledge). Here we visited the barking Fur Seal colonies. There were many young and the routine tussles between the Bull Seals and their hareem (array of squeezes)..this is bloke seal heaven.
Peninsular Valdes is a jewel..get down here bloke seals!!!
We had a marvellous guide, a humming bird of a lady called Veronica who took us through all the