A 20 hour coach ride took us south from Buenos Aires, into Patagonia, to a town called Puerto Madryn. Each year, from September to March, Southern Right whales come here to have calves. Each mother has one baby in these warmer waters and then heads further south the rest of the year to follow the krill. And each year tourists like Jill and I come here too.

Patagonia, the huge area in the cold south of Argentina, is where thousands of Welsh came in the 19th century to settle. I asked our tour guide why they came here and he said that it was because they had trouble with the English and then held his hands up as if to say, 'hey, I'm only telling it like it is.' Our multi-national coach seemed to find this very funny.

We went to a little town where the Welsh settled and saw ginger people. Apparently some of them still speak Welsh and I wonder if there's a very small community of them who have remained more Welsh than the Welsh in Wales.

Seeing the whales (whales, Welsh, Wales... this is confusing!) was well worth the 20 hour coach ride. (Saying that, the coaches are very comfortable, with seats you'd normally find in the first class section on a plane which tilt back like beds. They play movies and give you food too.) We maybe saw fifteen whales (all Southern Right ones). They're the size of the coach that brought us here, and once we were far out into the bay they came right up to the boat and stuck out their heads so you could almost touch them. Despite a lady and her two children vomiting near me the experience was amazing. (It seems that motion sickness is hereditary). The whales were swimming under the boat and no doubt could have capsized us if they wanted to. But we never felt threatened, they're really graceful animals and when we turned to return to the shore everyone on the boat had a wistful serenity and a happy smile (puking family aside).

We also went to see penguins and elephant seals: the penguins, and their waddle, were more entertaining. There were hundreds of them walking all around us. This type live on land half the year, when we saw them, and dig nests under the ground to incubate their eggs. Some of them nest so far from the water that it takes them a whole day to walk to their nest, and each year when they return they go back to the same nest. We were told to never stand in the way of one of them as they may get confused and go to the wrong nest: separating a couple forever. (Penguins are monogamous and mate for life).

On the way back from the penguins the tour guide came around and asked everyone where they were from, turned an atlas to the relevant page, and got us to talk about our countries. The food, the climate, the famous people. When she came to us she asked if it was true that it rains every day in London and I said, 'yes, it does rain every day,' and I asked her to explain what that yellow thing in the sky was. They all thought that we eat fish and chips all the time, and I said, 'yes, I suppose we do,' but I said that most Brits would choose curry or perhaps a roast dinner as their favourite meal. An Italian said that she thought Scotland is far more beautiful and I said that I didn't know enough to disagree. I said that England is mostly cities and we all live very close together without much countryside. As I was surrounded by Italian's, Germans, Dutch and Argentines I thought I'd say that they should all love the English as we invented football. That it's our gift to the world and then they have the temerity to beat us at it... but I resisted. I did say that England was the first country to have an industrial revolution: why I chose to share this I don't know.