Down south

And from the looks of it, never going to be able to get out, unless I brave a 2 day bus journey...thats what happens when you have a year of not planning i guess. you think ah, it will be ok, i will go all the way down to the bottom of argentina (well, nearly) to a v touristy and popular place in peak season and I wont book a flight out as i am not sure when i will want to leave, i{ll just book one a couple of days before i want one. ha! how daft am i. tried to book a flight today for a weeks time but they are all full until next may (or something...you get the picture!) so looks like i am going to be spending lots of time on buses....but have learnt my lesson and am going to make sure i book the bus tommorrow so i can at least suffer in luxury and not in the lowest class seats i have been travelling on so far as a result of my no-planning strategy.

But enough of that and more of what I have been doing.....principally wildlife related. So I think I left you all when i was getting sadder and sadder in a v cold grey Bariloche with an escape planned to the sun filled shores of Puerto Madryn. And it was indeed sunny and lovely and a very nice little diversion, made all the better by the fact that i met a lovely yank girl with whom I hired a car and then spent the next 2 days driving around gravel tracks singing along to bad latin music and trying to spot wildlife and not run over any penguins, that is once we had finally managed to find our way out of puerto madryn, signs not being high on argentinas list of priorities it would appear.

So, we saw big road runner birds, condors, lots of penguins (and rather disturbing hawk stealing baby penguin incident), an armadillo (handily running infront of the window where we were eating just after margi had said "wouldnt it be good to see an armadillo"), elephant seals (v cool) and 5 condors. Didnt see any whales but that was mainly on account of the fact that we didnt go out on a boat! turns out she has seen loads and the whales werent that many in number and werent being v exciting so decided just to drive around instead. Our most impressive moment came on sunday though....our bus went at 6pm, we left at 10, the worlds biggest colony of penguins outside antarctica was only 2.5 hrs away, no probs we thought. So imagine our surprise when we turned up at the colony to find the journey had somehow taken us 4 hours (neither of us had our clocks nearby) and that we would be pushing it to get back in time! There followed quick look at penguins (ooh how cute, ooh look at the babies....ooh look at that one being murdered by a nasty hawk) and a mad dash (at the sedate speed of 60km/hr as we were on gravel tracks) back foiled at every attempt to go the right way by a complete lack of sign posts ..... grrr. So stressed and tired and dirty finally to make it to the bus station with 3 mins to spare (thanks to nice car hire lady giving us a lift to the station) only to discover we hadnt read the ticket very well adn it actually went at 6.40....oh how we laughed!

So anyway, now after way too many hours on a bus I am now in the lovely little town of El Calafate ready to go and see some glaciers tommorrow..heres hoping it doesnt rain