Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Peninsula Valdes is a bit like an arrowhead, its shaft an isthmus five kilometres wide at its narrowest point. There is a bay to the north and a bay to the south, which experience high tide five hours apart, due to the current from the south which takes this long to make its way round the coast. Migrating birds such as the red knot, flying between Canada and Antarctica, find it a useful feeding ground, flitting between bays depending on where the tide is low. Puerto Madryn sits on the mainland by the larger bay, the Golfo Nuevo, and tours leave from here to the peninsula. The minibus leaves just after seven, and passes the town dump, the bauxite plant, some ceramics factories and the fishing fleet on its way to the whale breeding grounds. The tour takes eleven hours and covers 400 kilometres, embracing one of the greatest wildlife reserves in the world.

The Israeli who sat behind me was the son of Cochin Jews, of whom there are apparently only seven still living in India, the rest having migrated to Israel. I asked him if any are considering returning to India, as NRIs from the US, Britain and elsewhere are now doing, to enjoy the fruits of the boom. He said he thought not. He was intent on getting a photo of an armadillo, but by the end of the day had not succeeded.

This part of of Patagonia is flat scrubby desert, with white soil and and a frequent mauve-tinged cloud cover. Flashes of sea revealed themselves as we drove, increasingly so as we crossed the isthmus, passing a tidal island shaped like a squashed gaucho hat that is rich in bird life (it’s called Island of Birds), and heading for Puerto Piramides, the only settlement on the peninsula. It got its name from a pyramid shaped headland nearby, and its sandstone cliffs are full of fossils of giant shells, shark teeth and whalebones. It is the place for whale watching cruises, a bright little village of restaurants and tour agencies. A partner in the restaurant where we had lunch was Jimmy from Perth, who’s been more or less marooned for ten years tending to his mother, who is Argentinian and disabled and lives in Puerto Madryn. He was cheerfully resigned to his exile, and seemed happy at least to have escaped to the peninsula.

Soon enough our boat was ready to take us out to the whales, which we could easily see from the beach, splashing about in the waves. We climbed into an aluminium speedboat with twin outboards, with benches along the centre and sides. We were allowed to stand on these as soon as we were in the water, but the handrails were unnervingly low, and I’m sure they must lose the odd passenger overboard in choppy water. Hopefully not in the midst of mating whales.

There were whales everywhere – each year about a thousand come to the shelter of the peninsula to mate or give birth. They are Southern Rights, so named apparently because they swim slowly and float when dead, which made them the right whale to catch and the right whale to transport. The world population is about 20,000. They feed in the summer in Antarctica, and for the winter divide into three groups, heading for Australia, New Zealand and Argentina. We visited several pods thrashing around as well as some individuals standing on their heads with their tails out of the water. There are several theories as to why they do this, one being that they are pregnant females repositioning their foetus, another being that that it is a way of regulating their temperature. They do it for fifteen minutes or more at a time, and we approached several so close that we could almost touch the tail. The tails are smooth and black but the heads are encrusted with white formations made by crustaceans, allowing individual whales to be identified. Then we visited a group where three or four males were working together to turn over a female. The females turn on their back if they do not wish to mate, so the males turn them over so one of them can have a go. Apparently up to about fifteen males might mate with the one female. Makes me think they should rename Cronulla football team ‘The Whales’.

The female gestates for eleven months, during which time she will travel to Antarctica to feed (they don’t eat at all while they’re at the peninsula) and return. After giving birth she stays with the calf for a year if it’s male or eighteen months if it’s female, taking it to Antarctica and back to teach it to feed. While there the calf can grow two to three centimetres a day, feeding on krill and its mother’s milk, eventually reaching a size of about 16 metres. The population of Southern Rights is increasing by about seven per cent per year, but there are also threats. In 2007 a record 70 calves died (about 200 are born each year), many due to attack by seagulls, a phenomenon which I witnessed at Puerto Madryn on the first day. Madryn’s economy is thriving on an unlikely combination of ecotourism and Argentina’s only aluminium smelter, and the town is growing fast – it was by far the most prosperous I’ve seen here. This means that the open air rubbish tip is also growing fast, which in turn means that the seagull population has gone up. Seagulls have always eaten the cast off skin of whales, but now they’ve taken to pecking at the calves themselves and eating the blubber. Some calves die of the trauma, or from infections, in which presumably the rubbish tip plays a role. Scientists have been studying the problem for three years, and there is talk of culling some the gulls as only a proportion of them attack the whales. Doing something about the rubbish tip might be an idea, too. I’ve noticed that the Patagonian desert that lies near towns is strewn with plastic bags, which the shopkeepers here hand out with gay abandon.

We spent about an hour and a half among the whales, cruising from pod to pod, and once or twice could see them quite clearly underwater beside the boat. We also passed a colony of sea lions, and saw a group of Magellanic penguins – which have black stripes around their collar - far out in the bay. As we made our way back to port we passed a whale which breached three or four times as it headed out into the bay.

From Piramides we headed across the peninsula, past a couple of salt pans with flamingoes off in the distance, sighting a couple of grey foxes, two burrowing owls and a Patagonian hare the size of a small dog. We also saw a large flock of choique, large flightless birds. There are a couple of varieties of these, but I can’t remember the name of the bigger ones and I’m on the bus and can’t be bothered fishing out my notebook. One male of the flock is chosen to incubate the eggs, and when they start to hatch he breaks one egg to attract flies so that the other chicks can feed.

Our destination was the opening of a narrow bay formed by a long spit of land. The beach is the destination for elephant seals in mating season, which is just about to begin. The beach was grey and pebbly beneath blond cliffs which stretched in a vast arc, and we spotted three or four of the elephant seals – a couple of males and a couple of females. We weren’t allowed onto the beach, or to smoke or eat on the path. The males grow to four tonnes, while the females get to about 900 kilos, which sounds a bit uncomfortable to me. They spend ninety per cent of their lives in water, only coming on land to breed. Apparently this is the only place in the world where they do so. It’s also the only place in the world where orcas beach themselves to catch pups, swimming up in narrow channels that scar the beach, then wait for the tide to take them back out to share the meal with their family. The guide told us that in a month or two the beach would be thick with elephants, fighting, mating, giving birth and being eaten by orcas. Sounds bloody. On a tiny reef out in the surf we saw a group of sealions, but they looked puny by comparison. About 47,000 elephant seals visit the peninsula in season.

We then drove back across the peninsula, seeing some guanaco – like llama, but smaller and undomesticated – on the way, and plenty of merino, which form the local industry. There are 47 estancias on the peninsula. Back in Puerto Madryn, I communed once more with the flock of 100 or so flamingoes that live by the pier. With those heads and those hooked beaks I think they might give the old capybara a nudge for ridiculousness.

Yesterday I took a ride out to a couple of Welsh towns. The whole area was settled by Welsh, beginning in 1865, but there’s not much evidence of them in Madryn, nor was there in Trelew, the first town I went to, the name notwithstanding. Finally I made it to Gaiman, a couple of hours from Madryn, to discover a lovely town nestled on a river, with street names like Evans and Jones alongside the usual Espana and Yirogoyen, and little stone cottages, and flat-faced row houses with lacy curtains in sash windows. The town is overlooked by a tussocky ridge studded with knuckles of amber rock, and a place less like Wales would be hard to imagine. I didn’t hear any Welsh spoken – or English in a taffy accent for that matter – but I did see a hell of a lot of signs for places serving Welsh tea ‘con calido y autentico ambiente Gales’, or something like that. I thought I might like to sample this, as the Princess of Wales, peace be upon her, reportedly did so here in 1995, and as I don’t have a clue what Welsh tea might actually be. So I followed the signs, and followed them, over a suspension bridge across the Rio Chubut, past a couple of garages and up a dirt road, and graceful willow trees bursting with green shoots, and leafless poplars and pink blossoms, and sweet gardens decorated with rusting ploughs, but could not actually locate a functioning teahouse. Either that or I wasn’t willing enough to push on closed doors. Perhaps it was just that it was between 12 and four, when all kinds of things cease to function. Instead I took coffee and facturas in an ice cream parlour, pure Argentinian style. The girl who served me was pale, her hair starless and Bible black. She said her mother was Welsh, but she herself didn’t speak it. The family name was Jones, pronounced ‘Shoness’. That, and a couple of shops selling ceramic beer mugs and acrylic tea cosies in green and white, was what I tasted of the autentico ambiente Gales.

And that was the last adventure. I sit yet again on the bus, having watched a long and mournful Patagonian sunset, a sallow smear that lingered between the clouds and the featureless desert for a couple of hours before bursting briefly into translucent gold and purple, then transforming itself into sheets of scarlet draped across the sky. I hit Buenos Aires at seven-something in the morning, and fly out at ten to five. I’m tired and it’s time to go home.

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