… a busy week indeed!

Monday we took the ferry to Colonia (only takes an hour – high speed fancy boat so it was). We´d a nice lady with a crazy accent (mix of Uruguaian, British and American) who brought us round the town and told us a bit about it … they´ve a 63% divorce rate (!) and they also have ´public´ dogs. At home these would be called strays but not in Colonia, everyone in the town looks after the dogs collectively, and they all have names too. Apparently one of the dogs, Rocky, used to help our guide give the tour but he´s quite old now so only joins in at the end by the Church to say hi It was a lovely little town and well worth the day trip, the best bit however was the sunset which we watched from the beach … never knew the sky could go quite so red.

Tuesday we headed off to an estancia (ranch). That was great craic. We got to pretend to be cowboys and ride horses around the farm … although ´ride´might be overstating it … basically the horses knew the route and nothing was going to deter them from walking it so you better just sit there and leave them do their thing! After the horses we´d a bbq and were treated to some traditional folk songs and dancing from different regions of Argentina, of course audience participation was required and guess who got called up? Colm!! It´s becoming quite a habit We then watched two gauchos (cowboys) demonstrate their horse skills and trying to out do each other. Then a cup of mate (tea drink that they´re all obsessed with here … and they say the Irish drink a lot of tea? These people carry round flasks with them all day just so they´re never without!!) and hometime.

Wednesday we bid adios to Buenos Aires and flew down to Puerto Madryn. Once we arrived (and located a hostel) we headed down for a stroll to the beach. Now the primary reason for visiting Puerto Madryn was to go whale watching and we were discussing whether we would try book the trip for the following day or the day after, only to suddenly realise that you could see whales from the beach!! We headed up to the pier and spent the next hour or so watching whales showing off. As you can imagine we decided to book the whales watching for the following day! We were collected at 8.10am (freezing so it was!) and headed off on our trip. First stop was a nearby beach from which you can usually see whales around 100/200 meters away – this was to give us a ´taster´ … however there was a whale only 20 meters off the shores! He was rolling in the water (scratching his back on the seabed). I don´t know quite how to describe watching a whale from that close a distance while the sun is slowly rising over the sea, only than to say that it was absolutely awesome, in the true sense of the word. We then headed to the harbour to head out on a boat to see if we could find some more whales. It was a bit slow initially and looked as if our ´taster´ that morning would not be topped … however then a whale swam right up to the boat, lifted his head to take a peek at us all and then dived under the boat! … and then another dove under the boat a few minutes later!! As our captain said, we had achieved “maximum contacto”! We headed back into the harbour only to come around two more whales that drifed in with us, once of which leaped up out of the water several times creating huge splashes. It was definitely a day that neither of us will be forgetting in a hurry!

Now unfortunately the hostel we´re staying in has internet that seems to be constantly in demand so we´ve headed out to an internet cafe to upload some photos, but the connection is very slow (and then crashed altogehter … grrr) so we´ve only been able to upload some of the Colonia photos. We´ll upload the rest of the Colonia photos and the photos from the whale watching yesterday asap … promise!

PS … proof Irish people can´t go anywhere without meeting other Irish people … when we got on the bus yesterday morning to head off to see whales the driver was asking us all where we were from, and out of only 8 other people, 2 were also Irish … from Dublin! We were chatting away to them during the day and we all decided to head out for dinner last night when we got back to get some proper Argentinian steaks (very yum! and cheap!!) and during the course of the conversation, discovered not only were they from Dublin and she had done Arts in UCD too, but the guy was in Colm secondary school a few years behind him! Madness!!