We’d had a pleasant day at sea on the Star Princess following our back-to-back days in the capital cities of Argentina and Uruguay, Buenos Aires and Montevideo respectively, before returning to Argentina at the port of Puerto Madryn. We awoke and stepped out onto our mini-suite’s large balcony to see some lovely early morning colours in the sky and an Argentinian flag fluttering at the port’s long dock. Further along the shore we could see the Celebrity Infinity cruise ship also docked. What we could see of Puerto Madryn wasn’t particularly impressive but we wouldn’t be spending any time in the city itself as we had an excursion booked some distance to the south.
We had an early breakfast because our excursion was scheduled to be a long one taking up the whole day. After eating and getting our bits and pieces ready we disembarked, boarded our coach, then headed off through Puerto Madryn’s streets southwards. Once we’d got outside the city the landscape became very flat, very plain, very sombre-coloured. This region of South America – Patagonia – turned out to be quite depressingly dull and it wasn’t helped by a coach journey that took several hours and ran out of things to say from the tour guide fairly early on; there’s just so much you can mention about the Welsh immigrants and locals and seemingly unchanging landscape. I imagine the night skies from the area looking up to the stars would be utterly fantastic, though.
Our long and snoozy journey was broken up with a rest stop just outside the city of Trelew. I satisfied myself simply with a stretch of the legs and some photos of the bleak surroundings.
With everyone’s bladders emptied and everyone slightly perky once more we reboarded the coach and continued on towards the penguin colony at Punta Tombo. The scenery didn’t pick up and we probably would all have drifted back off to sleep again if it wasn’t for the bumpiness of the road leading to the colony.
