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 along the peninsula - all via gravel/dirt road. It took forever to get there, the posted 60km per hour speed limit really not advisable when you have only taken the base level of insurance with the hire car. The beach is famous as it is where killer whales are sometimes seen crashing onto the beach to grab sea lion pups for lunch. However this tends to be earlier in the year when the pups are newborn and so no such violent entertainment was to be seen. Darn it. There were however plenty of sea lions.

Given it took around two hours to travel the 76km to get there, we didn't spend long willing non-existent orcas onto the beach before we had to start back to get the whale watching boat. We took the longer coastal route to (a) desperately hope for a glimpse of killer whales further down the coast and (b) stop in on a colony of Magellanic penguins, which were pretty cool. This did mean we cut it rather fine in getting back to Puerto Pirámides, however we made it just in time. I don't think there were too many new chips on the car as we sped down the gravel roads at a breakneck 40km an hour!!

With a slightly more advanced take on the version seen on Chiloé, this time the boat itself was on a wheeled platform when we boarded it on the beach. The whole thing was then towed out until the boat floated off the platform and off we went.

We were assured that a pair of mother and calf Southern Right Whales had been seen that morning, and sure enough after around 40 minutes sailing we came across the new family. Absolutely stunning, the baby was some 8m long and the mother almost twice this. They seemed pretty unperturbed by the boat and we were able to get very close indeed. It was amazing to be so close to these enormous animals, apparently the last two to remain in the bay before heading south to Antarctica for the summer.

Time flew by and soon we were heading back to the port, very pleased to have caught one of the last successful trips of the season.