The Great South American Adventure

What up yo? Happy Easter everyone. How are you all going? Things are going pretty well over here. Puerto Madryn was good, saw some sea lions, elephant seals and a shite load of penguins. I met a couple good blokes from Buenos Aires, Hernan and Gaston, at the hostel in Puerto Madryn. Hernan had his car with him and was going to Peninsula Valdez so I took full advantage of that and got a lift with him. We stayed on the Peninsula at Puerto Pirimides for a night, which was good cause it meant we didn´t have to rush around the place trying to see everything in one day. Unfortunately we did not see any killer whales, despite going to the most likely place to see them at the most likely time two days in a row and waiting a total of about 8 hours. Oh well, there´s always documentaries. A couple of days later, after returning to Puerto Madryn, we went down to Punta Tombo, which was awesome. There is a massive Magellan Penguin colony there, and there is a path that goes right through there nesting area and up to the beach where they were always getting in and out of the water and swimming around in the shallows. It was so cool because they were always on the path and you just walked among them. Photos coming soon.

From Puerto Madryn, I took a bus to Esquel, which was pretty nice but I didn´t really do much there, because there wasn´t really much to do. I did walk to a small lake, which was pretty crap cause the walk was along a dusty road, instead of like a beaten track through forrests, and I watched a kids soccer game which was pretty good quality, on my way out of town. I hitchhiked to El Bolson with a father and daughter from Spain. They were pretty nice. The daughter had just moved over to Buenos Aires and the father had come over to do some travelling with her. I found all that out speaking only spanish, how good am I. In El Bolson, I have been working on a WWOOF farm, which is very chilled out and has been very kind on the budget. Work has included collecting rocks and shovelling dirt. I came down to town today, also hitch hiking, to check out the local handi craft market. I stopped to watch a street performer who was mainly juggling and joking with the crowd, and he asked me to come forward to throw flaming clubs to him while he balanced on a board on top of a cylinder on top of a box. I thought why me as he got the crowd to applaud until I got up and explained to him that I was Australian and didn´t really understand his instructions but he just forwarded this information to the crowd and laughed it off. It wasn´t so funny when he didn´t catch the third burning club cause I threw it to the wrong hand. And after the trick, which was the finale, he asked if I wanted to give him money, then made a joke about how little I gave him. Anyway, it´s all good. From here I´m going to go to Bariloche, probably on monday. Until then, stay tuned for more TALES OF INTEREST.