Punta Tombo: close encounters of the bird kind

We did it!! We saw penguins and so much more. But it wasn't easy.

During long stretches of riding, Chris and I each had different songs that kept recurring in our heads. Hers was "Country road, take me home" and mine was "Born to be wild", which probably says a little something about our personalities.

I thought it ironic that mine started with "get your motor running...", but it turned out to be just a little foreshadowing.
(And not just of how huge old rock songs are down here!)

The hills went up...










The hills went down...

It all felt pretty much the same because of the wind.

We have yet to experience the wind at our backs! Even one day when we left our stuff in one town and rode out to a little beach town for the day, we had a headwind on the way there and were pretty excited at getting a tailwind on the way home. But, no, the wind turned while we were having lunch and it was a headwind on the way home, too!

It's been pretty rainy at times, too. Here's me taking shelter in a bus stop...

People have been so nice to us, though. One particularly hard day, as we were stopped on the side of the road, a car pulled up and the man inside said that he had driven by us and thought we looked pretty tired, so he went into town and bought us Coca-Cola!

People have also offered us a lot of rides, as well, and sometimes we didn't say 'no'.

In fact, we decided to officially call this the "Planes, trains, busses, trucks and boats" bike trip.

We have ridden a little more than 500 km since arriving, which is pretty paltry for a bike tour, but we have worked hard for every single kilometer.

On the day we took this ride, I told Chris that the combination of the wind and the barren landscape that day had made me "tired in my soul". We laughed really hard in a "I can't believe we're doing this for fun!" kind of way, then felt a lot better.

We let go of our goal of trying to ride 100km each day, and decided that we had only one objective - penguins!

So we jumped on a bus to the Peninsula Valdes.

The bus turned out to be way more of a hassle than getting rides, though. I paid a ridiculous amount of money for this man to "box" my bike, which really involved just taping many pieces of cardboard onto the bike.

This is how it arrived in Puerto Madryn.
We rode our bikes out onto the Peninsula Valdes.

Sadly, we discovered that the only penguins on the peninsula were down a gravel road that had been closed due to recent torrential rain.


So we went whale watching.

There were mom and baby Franca Austral whales (Southern Right whales) swimming really near to the boat and putting on quite a show for us.




The whales were breaching (jumping almost entirely out of the water) in order to communicate with the other whales in their group about the annual migration they would all soon be heading off on. Usually the mom would jump first, followed by the baby. It was pretty breathtaking to be so close to such big animals. At one point in time, the baby was riding along in its' mom's back!

We heard that the largest colony of Magellanic penguins was a bit further south, so we headed as far as we could by bike, then hitched down the remaining gravel road to Punta Tombo, a world heritage site. We ended up getting a ride home with the park ranger, Miguel, which was great because he kept stopping to point out and educate us about animals in the reserve including maras (patagonian hares), choiques (small ostrich-like birds) and their young, a zorro (grey fox), patagonian weasels, eagles, hawks and a ton more birds.

He also invited us to come back with him two days later when the baby penguins were hatching. Of course we said 'yes'.

This is a penguin in its nest with an egg that the baby penguin is just starting to bust out of (you can see a tiny hole).

We could only see the baby penguins for a second at a time when the penguins would lift up, so didn't get any decent photos, but they were so adorable! They were only a day or so old and really little and grey and fluffy.

The male and female penguins take turns incubating the eggs and feeding the young while the other goes swimming and fishing.

Shift change.

Because we were the first people there in the morning, we saw a lot of other wildlife as well. These guanacos were running all around us, eating and snorting loudly.

There was some strange mixing of animals, as well. Here are sheep, guanacos and penguins, not the three species I most expected to be hanging out together.

I was pretty smitten with the penguins.

And in true Argentinian fashion, Miguel took us home at the end of the day to meet his family, eat homemade empanadas and drink maté before we jumped on an overnight bus for the Andes.