Today, in a moment of technological adeptness, I successfully loaded penguin videos onto my youtube account. All by myself!! There they join a video my professor made of a song called "I don't drink beer," which a team at the Rice Digital Media Center help desk had to help me load. The student becomes the master.
These two penguins seem to be having some sort of domestic dispute with their neighbor. I guess they don't like the way he smells up the bush or something.
Who knew penguins sound like wookies? I sure didn't.
Ok moving on.
So we spent the night in Puerto Madryn, and took a bus in the morning to Puerto Pirámides on Península Valdes. Excitingly, our hostel had a drip coffee maker!!! I miss drip coffee.
Apparently the Puerto Pirámides bus station is just the gas station.
We arrived around lunch, so we ate at this restaurant. They had Joy Division, Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix posters all over the place and all the waiters had dreadlocks. I guess they were sort of going for a post punk, Andy Warhol, glam rock, hippy theme. Or they just did a lot of drugs. I'm not sure.
Unfortunately, the food wasn't all that good. I guess post-punk glam rock hippies don't like salt or spices.
Then we went to the beach. They use tractors to take the boats out!!
They had lots of whale bones all around town. This was the most complete set.
And a jelly fish, which Zig thought was trash and almost grabbed. Then, once he realized it was a jelly fish he decided to poke it with his finger anyway.
We hung out at the beach for a couple of hours, and then went on our whale watching tour!
The tour guide kept refusing to speak to me in Spanish, so I just refused to speak to her in English. It worked out.
Tractor!!
WHALES!
My camera isn't very fast, so I have a lot of pictures that look like this...
I also have a lot of pictures with this ladies head in them.
All of the whales we saw were mommies with their babies. Our boat was small so we got pretty close to them.
That last picture is a whale that just swam under our boat!!
And then my camera ran out of batteries. Luckily, we had Zigs super fancy camera and got some super sweet shots!! Unluckily, Zigs photos are so big that my computer shuts down anytime he tries to send them to me.
That night we stayed at La Casa de Tía Alicia. We had a melon for a snack and Tía Alicia cut it up for us because apparently we weren't doing it right. See also called and reserved our whale tour for us. There were cats. Her husband was always wandering around carrying tools for no apparent reason. It was awesome. I'm so sad I didn't take pictures.
The next morning we went back to the beach. The tide had come in, and we met another very similar looking dog. We thought it was the same one, but then then two more came around the corner. They must have a small golden retriever factory somewhere in town.
Then we met this guy who said he'd drive us around the Península in his truck and show us animals for 300 pesos. Okey dokey.
Very nice view of the town.
Turns out he was some animal finding jedi. He would drive down the road at about 50 mph and suddenly stop the car and say, "Look, there's an owl! Do you see it?"
No. I don't see it.
Zig found it through his camera lens and got some good pictures. Still working on compressing them.
Then he started driving really slowly, and Zig asked if he saw anything. He said, "Usually there are baby foxes here." And guess what, there were.
I should've been tipped of to his jedi-ness by his hardcore driving goggles and missing finger. He knew what was up.
There were lots of those big jackrabbit bunnies. I even spotted that one lying down first because his ears were sticking up!
Rheas...
and sheep...
Then he said, "run over to that cliff and take some pictures of the sea lions down below. But do it fast because its illegal." Ok.
Then he took us to a legit sea lion/elephant seal viewing spot. I think they may have just all been elephant seals. I'm not really sure how to tell them apart. But also, there were babies!! See the little bitty ones?
Finalmente, more penguins. I didn't take as many pictures though.
We told the guy we were going back to Puerto Madryn that night, and he told us he'd drive us for no extra charge since he was going there anyway. Sweet!! And he gave us candy.
UPDATE: Since I started this post, Zig has managed to compress his pictures to a size that would load on my blog. SUCCESS!!!
First, whale watching. Here I am all ready with my life vest.
Whales breathing...
Thats a mighty big head you've got there...
Then, Zig had to pee so bad that he couldn't take anymore photos. So I got to!
Look, a mommy and a baby whale!
The mommy is checking us out...
The driver said that the seagulls land on the backs of the whales and eat the fat, and that it takes over a year for the cuts to heal. Stupid seagulls. For some reason though, the whales couldn't get rid of them, despite jumping out of the water at them. I feel like in a fight between a whale and a seagull there should be an obvious winner. Stupid whales.
OOOH pretty!
Bye bye Ms. Whale!
Here are the photos from day two:
The owl. Or buo as we say in español.
And the foxes!!
I like how this one looks sot of embarrassed.
Big rabbits AND sheep.
The guide stopped us to look at these birds (there were two adults). Then he said, "oh look do you see the baby??"
No. So we sat there for about 20 minutes trying to see the baby. Then I saw it!! Its the tiny speck in the middle of the photo, vertical with that top clump of grass and horizontal with the big clump. This is Zig's biggest lense at its farthest zoom. It was so tiny! How on earth did that guy see it???
I like how the baby seal is all turned on its back. Silly.
And lastly, a herd of wild guanacos.
Ok thats it for now. One more posts worth of pictures I think.
Chau!
Chau!
