14 - At sea - Friday 26th January
n
Patters for today and tomorrow and port guide here:
Today is a sea day and time to recover from the excitement of the Falklands. That was an unforgettable experience and wonderful people. They are more British than most of us are.
I now have a bit of a crisis. All the photos so far have been taken on either my Galaxy S8 phone or a Panasonic DMZ-TZ80 compact camera which can give some good results but is prone to getting stuck when you take it to the beach and sand gets in. That wasn't the problem with it this time however. It has its own proprietary charging lead and I am absolutely certain that I took one with me in my little box of 'essential bits of memory sticks and charger leads' but it was nowhere to be found. And I was down to one bar on the camera's battery. I now had a choice. I could try to conserve the battery by only taking essential pictures and using the phone for everything else, but the phone is not great on anything zoomed. I could try to buy a lead on the boat or I could try to find a camera store ashore that might have one, but that would be unlikely and use up valuable exploration time. I even contemplated ordering one on the Brazilian version of Ebay and having it sent direct to our first hotel but when I logged in and set my country to 'Brazil' all the web pages turned into Brazilian which is not one of my languages.
I slept on the problem and then it occurred to me. Buy a new camera! The photographers on board only had a limited stock left but what they did have was a new, boxed Panasonic DC-FZ80 at what seemed to me to be a reasonable price.I thought it would be even more reasonable with my 10% discount but later found that it didn't apply to the photographers. This has very similar controls to the other one so it shouldn't be too difficult to pick up the new features and it has a good zoom lens.
Then, after I had bought the camera, I realised that it needed a memory card. The one in the other camera was suitable but even though the photographer assured me that I wouldn't lose all the photographs on it I didn't want to take that risk. I backed them up anyway and went downstairs and bought another memory card. After we got home I checked the prices and they were actually quite good. I think the lack of VAT helped.
So, boys and girls, the photos from now on are either from the phone or from my new toy
Tomorrow (Saturday) we call at Puerto Madryn. Now I must admit that I had never heard of this place when I booked the cruise and I still didn't know anything about it 3 weeks before it began and let's be honest, who does? What everybody does know, however, is that there is a part of Patagonia that was settled by the Welsh many years ago around the time that rugby was invented. Maybe that's what they were getting away from. Patagonia is a very big and vague place and basically covers the bottom half of Argentina and across into Chile. Legend has it that the name was coined by Magellan when he met one of the original locals and found that they were very big and tall, up to 12 feet according to some accounts, and called them 'Patagoni' which meant 'Bigfeet', apparently. The truth is most probably more prosaic but the name and legend have stuck.
In 1865 about one hundred and fifty Welsh settlers found a good landing place and called it 'Porth Madryn' after Castle Madryn and its estate near Pwllheli in North Wales. They must have been sorely disappointed because instead of rolling green valleys what they found was a very dry and flat landscape with very little water and not much vegetation.Nevertheless, they stayed and gradually began to make a success of the area by building irrigation ditches to take water from the Chubut river. They then moved nearer the river and founded the town of Trelew some forty miles to the south.
When around Christmas time I eventually started to examine the ports of call more closely I found that there are three main attractions to this place. There is the Welsh heritage, but we've been to Wales many times and it's only two hours away if we ever want to go there again. There are the penguins at the Punta Tomba nature reserve a two hour drive to the south, and there is the Península Valdés to the north east which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Mrs QB had mentioned something about elephant seals on some travel programme and I found out that you can find them on this peninsula as well as lots of sea lions an yet more penguins but what really clinched it for me was when I found out that the north-east point of this place is the very spot where the Orca killer whales surge up the beach in order to try and catch a sea lion cub or two. This is where the famous footage was shot by Sir Davd Attenborough and his crew for the first Blue Planet. If there was any chance whatsoever of seeing this for real then we were going to take it.
Alarms set again for an early start and who knew what the morrow might bring.