Day 13 - Puerto Madryn

When we woke this morning we'd tied up to one of the two very long jetties in Puerto Madryn - the second largest fishing town in Argentina, but a pretty small, sleepy country town from what we saw. It is a flat town in a very flat, dry countryside. It looks like fairly remote outback Australia, with low scrub and no trees at all.

After breakfast we looked around the town. That mostly meant walking along the seafront. Ttide was out, and it goes a long way out so there was a wide green tidal flat with a few people walking about. The shops were a mixture of tourist souvenirs (they very much like selling mate cups and mental straws throughout Argentina), restaurants and a few hotels. Lynn bought some stuff, largely to use up our pesos. We walked a few blocks further into the town where there were fewer souvenir shops but not much else.

In the late morning we didn the included free tour; 'Highlights of Puerto Madryn and Gaiman Welsh Tea'. The bus drove us straight out of Puerto Madryn and across the featureless plain for about 60km to Gaiman, a small Welsh-heritage village. There were at least four bus loads of tourists and we were driven around Gaiman, shown the hill, the old school and old post office. The whole thing was roughly equivalent to the ship arriving at Port Augusta and our being bussed to Crystal Brook.

In a large hall we had tea and some cake. A local choir sang in Spanish and Welsh. Then we milled around outside, boarded the bus and drove back. When we got to the town the bus drove us along the seafront (presumably this constituted all of the highlights of Puerto Madryn) and to the ship. We sailed at just after 4pm.

Lynn variously described this as 'the most boring excursion ever' and 'we would have been better off staying on the ship and having a sleep'. But I feel we did get a sense of regional Argentina.