Patagonia - from bikini to mittens

I only had a few days left in South America, and still hadn´t seen any of the south of Argentina, so I did a quick 10 day trip, and will have to go back in the future, because it was brilliant, and there´s still so much I didn´t see!

I arrived in Trelew on the 1st March. My first night was in a surprisingly really nice hotel, and I spent most of the night worrying that I´d misheard when they told me the price...but it was nice to have my own bathroom for a change. I didn´t see any Welsh people, but apparently they were around there somewhere. There was a small museum about the first Welsh settlers, 160 of them who came across to get away from the nasty English. They lived in these huts carved into the rock on the coast when they first arrived, before they could build proper houses, and you can still see where the rock has been carved away. Got to Puerto Madryn on the 2nd, and hired a bike and rode 14km to a protected site where I saw a whole colony of sea lions! It was really amazing, I didn´t expect to get so close to them, but I was on a cliff just above a small beach where they´d all congregated, and they were so noisy and fighting with each other (in a friendly way I think!). It was really a nice surprise, especially after I`d cycled all that way on sandy (and slippery!) roads in the sun with no shade at all. All the land around was just scrub and sand. I met someone later on that had been swimming with the sea lions! Apparently it was very cold and there was very poor visibility in the water, but the sea lions came right up close and were very playful. I also thought they would kill you but apparently the biting was just friendly too. There´s also the largest colony of magellic penguins in nearby Madryn, but I only had time to see one dead one I found on the beach :( I did spend some time on a nicer bit of the beach sunbathing too, as it was lovely and warm, in the late 20s I think.

Got the overnight bus down to a dull, drab and depressing town in the south called Rio Gallegos. The bus trip was cool though, I started off sitting next to a heavy metal band - all dressed in black with long hair and sunglasses, which was funny, but after that the sights outside were brilliant - there were small lagoons with flamingoes and emus or ostriches kept running across the road, and apart from that, it was just desertland.

After escaping Gallegos, I got to El Calafate, and this was more like it. Very "outdoorsy", in the middle of nowhere, just a small town with nothing around it. I took a boat tour of the glaciers, which were very impressive, and of course it was freeeeeezing. There were about 200 tourists on the boat, which was a bit annoying, but I guess I have to expect other people to visit places as well as just myself. The water got a bit rough for about an hour, and I felt kinda sea sick, but wasn´t as bad as some of the others on the boat, who I really felt sorry for! Everyone got handed plastic bags just in case. The water clamed down though, and the first glacier we saw was amazing, the ice is a really striking blue colour, because of the minerals in the water and the way the light is reflected. We could here the ice cracking and a bit broke off while we were watching. So it was a long day looking at ice and being cold, but well worth it.

My last two days I spent in El Chaltén, which is a bit further north than Calafate, but smaller and less busy. It has a beautiful national park which is really well looked after, so much so that we could drink ANY of the water there, in the lakes and streams, and from the taps, which I haven´t been able to do anywhere else. I went on SUCH a long walk yesterday to see some of the sights in the park - more glaciers and lagoons, and it started snowing! It felt so weird that I´d been sunbathing just a few days before, in the same country, and now was freezing alive in the snow! Despite the freezingness, it was really lovely in El Chaltén, and Patagonia is the area I most want to return to so far, as I didn´t have time to do so many things and go to so many places!