I repeat the bus ride to Puerto Piramides and meet a couple of people from Puerto Madryn who look familiar, we are all off for intense whale watching.
Stop in at the estancia for a café con leche, still off the menu, and wander up the road to the Hostal Nomade.
www.ecohosteria.com.ar/
Laura is beaming in reception, check into the room and its off for some more whale watching, this time with Botazzi, one of the companies who run a venture down here. It’s a much smaller boat, a rib, and we get right up close to the whales, close enough to get covered in whale snot. There are many mothers and calves hanging around. The mothers dive and the calves hang out around the boat waiting for the mothers to return from the depths. We get back in time for some sunset whale watching from the shore. There's a collection of people who brave the brisk wind and chill to watch the whales bathe in the golden light. They come close to the shore and there is a merry dance of Fins; you can hear the breathing quite clearly. It’s a beautiful bay and the sunset is really dramatic. Its back to the Estacion Restaurant for a dish of the best spaghetti de mare that I’ve had for a long time. Huge whelks and other unidentifiable legs and flesh, but a real creation. It’s a welcome change to slip into a bed that hasn’t had a thousand backpackers in it. I sleep like a baby, the breakfast is bread and jam with a little queso but I have to nip back to the room to get some fruit which I’ve squirreled away, that should stem the scurvey. Today it’s a trip along the coast, which is a wave cut platform, exposed until the very last point of high tide. The beach is exposed and there are a couple of dead whale pups that didn’t make it lying in a mound on the beach with a few opportunist gulls chomping away on the blubber.
The cliffs are dramatic around here, great shear walls of friable limestones and arenaceous sandstones mingled with occasional beds of fine clay. The upper most beds are highly fossiliferous and contain some exquisite cross bedding and g-zillions of shells of all types. The platform right out to the western end of the beach is littered with the fossils of giant Oysters, bigger than your hand; in fantastic condition. There’s a wonderful collection of marine birds feeding on the exposed seaweed, including some regal herons which are incredibly shy and stay well away as you approach them. I get out my Patagonian wildlife guide and they are not mentioned, which isn’t much of a surprise as most of the birds I have seen don’t make it into the hall of fame. Also the illustrations are done by somebody who clearly smokes too much weed and freelances for Viz…or do Oystercatches have unreasonably large testicles?? There’s a few people on the exposed part of the platform watching a whale and pup who are close to the shore and being harassed by guls, (in a similar vein to trying to eat chips on Brighton sea front without being mobbed by voracious, predatory Herring gulls) Get some great shots of the whale riding gulls and get back to the beach before the tide cuts off the headland.
Its very tempting to have a swim, the waters not brassic, and besides the obvious Orca shorties flicking through the consciousness, you would be the only person and this arouses suspicions. I question La-La about it over breakfast and she says you’d have to be mad or English to attempt it.
I have various chats with the L’s (that’s La-La, Laura and Lauren who all work as general managers, breakfast hosts and anything else that needs hotelling) and the same old gripes surface about the way that Argentina is going (and has gone on) They have all been to University, which is all very well except that there is no job opportunities, very little well paid work and so there is a brain drain to Brazil, Europe and anywhere else you can work in your chosen vocation. This is echoed by all the professions, particularly Doctors, who qualify, but there are no hospitals to work in, they go abroad or drive taxis or develop a tango routine.
To exascerbate the situation, the President is corrupt, lining his pocket in the good old tradition, and attention is really deflected away from the plight of the average person. Take the “Veteranos Malvinas’. Turns out that most of the guys (and gals) who fought in the rather embarrassing “Falklands conflict’ were not regular soldiers but conscripts, and thus are not entitled to the benefits afforded to regular soldiers, pensions, WIA compensation. Hence the camps set up in most of the plazas near government buildings at the moment in Buenos Aires.
One of the most famous sons of the area is ‘Roberto "Beto" Bubas’ and he is the Orca king. A park ranger, he has developed a unique relationship with the Orca as you can see on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecXK_p7FW7M
Surprisingly he is not allowed on the beach any more to serenade the Orca, don’t know the reason but if the Orcas had a vote, he would be reinstated.
Its time to leave PP and its been a real wilderness pleasure, its unlikely that things will change too much here due to the limited flights, hotels (at present) and primarily, its remoteness.
Photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/marco.nails/PuertoPiramidesMorphologyOfACoastline031120092053#
http://picasaweb.google.com/marco.nails/PuertoPiramidesOnHigh05112009#
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