Part 2 of 3: Penguinos de la playa

Part 2 of 3: Penguinos de la playa

Later in the week, we booked a took of a nearby penguin colony. Luckily, there were about 350,000 penguins around all posing for their close-ups on this windy and sunshiny day. We walked along the path marked by nothing but differently colored rocks and peeked into the thousands of nests. The penguins, about 44-46 cm tall, could waddle by and fall the short distance to the ground on their bellies to take a nap. A-dorable.

While some were napping, some were standing facing the wind, flapping their wings and honking as loudly as possible. The noise was similar to what I imagine it would sound like to choke a duck.

After the penguins, we stopped in the town of Gaiman, a Welsh village in the middle of Argentina. Their we visited a paleontological museum, MEF, among the best in South America. My favorite was the Argentinosaurus.

We ended the tour in Trelew, another Welsh town that serves as the perfect spot to drink full tea. Included in the spread was unlimited black tea with milk and plates full of buttered breads, scones, cheese with bread, welsh cakes and gingerbread, and other desserts like jellyrolls, cream cheese cake, lemon cake and an apple tort.

Almost all were delicious. My favorite was a tie between the gingerbread (scored big because of the heavenly smell) and the scone, which had the perfect amount of sweetness. The quaint atmosphere of the tea house also contributed to the peaceful afternoon.

We returned to the hostel to make dinner (stir fry) and friends who spoke English. One voluminous redhead, a self described “gap-year traveler” had recently come from Holland to South America to explore the world. Caught between high school and “uni”, he is traveling first through South America, then to Canada to learn how to be a ski instructor. Then, back to Holland to study econometrics... Whatever that is.

Another guy, with a pointy nose and well-loved baseball cap, had a heavy Wisconsin accent despite spending the past two years living and working in Brazil. A Brewers fan, he traveled to AR for his vacation this year, but will return to the US for a week or so in the summer.

Hostels are pretty cool like that - putting you in touch with people from around the world.

On Wednesday, we decided to relax by scaling down a sandy cliff in order to see a colony of elephant seals. The only elephant seal that I had seen before was the one we happened upon while kayaking with the whales. It was alone and Eloise, our guide, told us it was probably dying and didn’t want to be near the others. S/he was grouchy.

But, the elephant seals we saw at this beach were really huge and totally lazy. The rolled over only to get a closer look at us when we approached. Determining that we weren’t much of a threat, they just went back to sleep. We enjoyed getting very close to them and taking about a million pictures. We also saw orcas in the ocean swimming by, which is extremely rare this time of year.

All in all, it was yet again, an awesome experience.

27.5 hours of consecutive traveling later, we had bade farewell to our favorite hostel ever, boarded 3 different buses, and walked over the river and through the woods (truly) to our hostel in El Calafate - a hipster-type, cool kids hostel. We didn’t fit in.