After leaving the town of Puerto Madryn we drove south to Punta Tombo, a peninsula where there is the largest colony of Magallenic penguins in S America. Now we were impressed by the number on the Valdes Peninsula but this just blew us away. The 3 km long, 600 m wide Punta Tombo peninsula is covered with sand, clay and gravel and between September and April thousands of penguins, scientists believe more like 1 million, come to lay their eggs and get the baby penguins ready for migration north to Brazil for the winter. The whole area was covered with small burrows, some under shrubs, with one or both parents standing guard or sitting on an egg. Photos just don't do it justice. Occasionally one adult goes to the sea for food. It must take then ages as some of the nests are quite a distance from the beach and they are not the speediest of creatures on land. They are not at all fazed by all the humans walking around and just waddle by you without batting a flipper. We also got a glimpse of a Patagonian Hare and the Patagonian Silver fox.

They don’t let you camp in the park and with nowhere nearby we found a quiet spot by the side of a gravel road and parked up. A couple of locals drove by and a group of lads in a Land Rover stopped to chat and asked us to come visit them. We might give that a miss.

Next day we headed into Trelew, one of the Welsh towns on the east coast. We booked into a small hotel. They all have the same giant register which requires you to give your name, age, nationality, passport number, occupation, marital status, date of arrival and departure. For some unknown reason Peter finds this a bit much and tries to say he is 21, but that just gets a laugh and then says he is a psychiatrist in the hope that they can’t spell it. The trouble is he can’t spell it. He said next week he is going to be a taxidermist or possibly a phlebotomist.

Trelew in 1867 consisted of 3 farms that soon found irrigation of the land, from the water of the river Chubut, made life a lot easier and they quickly had a booming wheat growing enterprise. The Chubut River flows 800kms from the Andes to the Atlantic Ocean and has the very rare characteristic being higher than the land around it. Transporting the wheat was a problem until the 1880’s when the railway was completed linking Trelew to Puerto Madryn. The town of Trelew grew around the railway station and got its name from the Welsh Tre = town, and Lew = short for Lewis, the Lewis Jones, lead manager of the concession to build the railway. Originally Trelew depended on the municipality of the nearby town of Gaiman but in 1903 it got independence but in the 1930’s things turned sour with the depression, fall of wheat prices and bad management by the Argentinian government. A lot of the Welsh settlers moved on.

Not much evidence of the Welsh survives but they still celebrate their Welsh ancestry every year in a big festival and the Argentinian flag is generally accompanied by the welsh flag wherever you see it around the town. A few of the original 34 chapels (Capilla) dating back to the late 1800’s, still exist. These doubled as places of worship and social centres. They sometimes went to the chapel 3 times a day so the chapels were located in equidistant sites to no more than 10kms. I looked up equidistant and it is some really complicated looking mathematical formula. They were obviously very clever farmers with a lot of time on their hands.

Whilst in Trelew Peter had another battle with ATM’s but after visiting 5 banks he finally got some cash. We seem to spend a lot of time trying to get money but it’s quite satisfying when we finally get some. After this we popped into the rather modern looking Paleontology museum which hit the news in 2014 when a new species of Titanosaur (herbivore from the Cretaceous period) was found on a nearby farm. It turned out to be the largest animal ever to walk the Earth. Based on the size of its thigh bone it was 40m (130ft) long and 20m (65ft) tall and weighed 77 tonnes (as heavy as 14 African elephants) and 7 tonnes heavier than the previous record holder, the Argentinosaurus. Partial skeletons of seven individuals were dug up - about 150 bones in total - all in remarkable condition. We actually got to touch a bone of a giant Sauropd in the museum, at a mere 110 million years old.They also had some fossilized Dinosaur eggs

The old railway station, around which the town grew, is now a museum with a few bits belonging to the early settlers. After that lunch called so we headed to the Touring club, a historic hotel dating back to the 1920’s on the site of a former hotel and it’s burnt out neighbour. The owner imported materials from Europe including English china and cutlery, iron and brass bed, large bathtubs with German fittings, oak closets and English mirrors. The bar, entrance lobby and meeting room still have all their original features. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid stayed here for several months and we asked the owner if we could have a look around and he showed us the actual room Butch Cassidy stayed in.

The pair with Sundance’s girlfriend were in Argentina from 1902 to 1906 and even bought a ranch with money they acquired from robbing an Argentine bank (that was a bit cheeky). In 1905 fearing that the Pinkerton Agent Frank Dimaio had located them they sold the ranch. The Governor of the province issued an arrest warrant, but before it could be executed, Sheriff Edward Humphreys, a Welsh Argentine who was friendly with Cassidy and rather fancied Sundance’s girlfriend, tipped them off. They fled to Chile but returned after a short time. Sundance’s girlfriend was obviously fed up so she returned to the USA in 1906 and Cassidy and Sundance fled to Bolivia where they were killed.

We left Trelew the next day and went a little down the road to the Welsh town of Gaiman. The railway station in this town had also been converted into a museum full of settler relics. The curator was very informative. I think he was pleased to have a visitor. Two girls in the museum from the USA and Wales were both doing PHD's. The Welsh girl was staying in the town until April 2017 (good luck to her) looking at the role of musical instruments in the original settler community or something like that.

After this we went to one of the original tearooms for a traditional Welsh tea. It was quite bizarre listening to the woman in the kitchen speaking Welsh. When the tea arrived ( 3 cakes, 2 scones, apple strudel type thing and 3 slices of buttered bread) Peter said he couldn't eat all that but 20 minutes later the plate was empty. We stayed the night at the tearoom. Peter went for a walk and got bitten by a dog (good thing he had those Rabies jabs).

Next day we left Gaiman after a visit to a Paleontology park which consisted of a long walk up a hill to see some amazing layers of sediments that had been at the bottom of the ocean millions of years ago. One layer had lots of oyster like shells and another had the fossilized tunnels of a shrimp which reinforced the sides of the tunnel with nodules. Then of cross country to Chile.