Animal Magic

We spent quite a few days in and around Puerto Madryn, on the east coast of Argentina in Patagonia.  It´s an amazing place for having such a high degree of animal watching opportunities in proximity.  For this reason, it definitely gets a Silver Llama award.  The town itself was also really nice.

Here we are all dressed up about to go on a whale watching trip, to see Southern Right Whales.  Which indeed we did, as illustrated below.

We actually saw quiet a few whales, including a mother and baby, but they were quite hard to capture properly on camera, and this is about as good as it gets.  But it was a most enjoyable trip.






I think one of my favourite animals of all was the Armadillo, which I´ve never seen before.  They scurry around in a rather charming manner before burying themselves away in a network of tunnels.  I was really quite fascinated by them.

On the same trip we also went to see Elephant Seals -if you look closely on this photo on the left, you can see them in the background.  They spend hours just lying on the beach, looking very much as if they are dead.  A trip the next day enabled us to see them at much closer quarters, we were walking on the beach right by them.  They did mostly still appear comotose, but occasionally there was some activity, as captured in the photo on the right.  It was amazing being so close to them, the grown males are absolutely ginormous.

The final trip we went on was to Punto Tombo,to see the penguins.  I absolutely loved this, there were penguins everywhere, nesting, and waddling to and from the sea on their five-day fishing trips to feed their mates.  The males and females take it in turns to sit on the eggs and go fishing, very equitable.