Thankfully upgraded for free from one of those yellow and red Fisher Price cars to a decent 4 door saloon (not a VW Gol, shock horror) we set off with Julie and Graham for Puerto Pirámides to get on a whale watching boat. Thankfully the 100km journey is all via paved roads. Arriving mid-morning we'd just missed a couple of departures and so booked onto a tour leaving at 4pm that afternoon. This just gave us time to visit the sea lion community some 76km further...

Time to begin the mammoth journey back north. Next on the itinerary was the Welsh founded town of Puerto Madryn. We looked into flying but the few direct flights had sold out months ago and via Buenos Aires was only slightly cheaper than a first class ticket on Virgin Galactic. Bus it was. This involved two journeys, a mere 5 hours to the east coast town of Rio Gallegos and then a 17 hour overnight marathon up to Puerto Madryn. Anything of interest to report? No...

A day of rest, we booked an evening on a local estancia (farm) for later on and so spent the day relaxing at the hostel and pottering around the pretty, touristy, town. We were picked up in the early evening and taken to the Estancia 28 de Mayo, literally on the edge of town rather than out in the countryside as we were expecting. History sidebar, 28 May marked the end of the 1810 revolution. Originally the estancia was far outside the town and the property stre...

"The Big Ice", a 3 hour hike on the Perito Moreno glacier. Although it is only the third biggest glacier in the national park, Perito Moreno is the most famous as its front wall reaches a peninsula separating two lakes and so a viewing platform offers extremely close up views. Size-wise, despite taking the bronze medal it is still 30km long with a surface area of some 250 square kilometres. The front wall is 5km wide. This was the first stop in the tour, and it ...

The next morning we said goodbye to Chile for the last time on this trip and caught the bus back into Argentina, to El Calafate. As you can see from the photo accompanying this entry, there was a big sign at the border proclaiming Argentina's ownership of Las Malvinas, otherwise known as the Falkland Islands. For wont of any real policies, the current president of Argentina is making big thing of this and in fact there are similar signs to this all over the coun...