It’s wabbit, no, whale-watching season!!
Bastards! (aka…getting there)
Before I left for Uruguay, I had booked an airline ticket to Puerto Madryn on the damned Aerolineas Argentinas website. The price was fantastic, and booking it over the net meant that I didn’t have to go down there and pay for the ticket in person. Once I figured out what the error messages were and finally gave them my Visa number, I was set.
Ha. Things are so rarely that easy.
Apparently the Aerolineas booking service isn’t technologically advanced enough to accept international credit cards like Visa, so they cancelled my reservation. I was in Uruguay and not checking my email, so Jacob came to the rescue and made another reservation for me, to be paid in person when I got back to Buenos Aires.
At the booking office at the other end of the city, the agent pulls up my name and tells me that all five of my reservations are cancelled because the system can’t process so many, which is incredibly odd because I only remember making two. After much arguing with the agent in an odd mix of English and Spanish, and after producing yet another (yes, the sixth) reservation (the one Jacob had made), the agent finally processed my ticket.
Yes! I was goin’ a-whale watching!!
Puerto Madryn
I finally got there, which on Aerolineas should be considered a miracle in itself if they already hadn’t done some serious damage to their passengers with the turbulence and the wicked excuse for food. Jacob had arranged a transfer to the hostel 70 km away, and as I stepped out of the arrivals lounge, sure enough there was a bearded man holding up a sign with my name scratched out on the front. I felt so important!! Once at the hostel, delivered by the faithful transfer driver, I booked my tour to Peninsula Valdes to see the local wildlife: whales, marine elephants, and sea lions.
The whales at Peninsula Valdes (the name given to the entire wildlife area because it juts out into the Atlantic) are right whales, which means they don’t have fins on their backs and you can’t see them at Marine Land. They come to Peninsula Valdes during the winter mating season to frolic in the calm and temperate (2�Celcius) waters.
Puerto Madryn, situated almost on the peninsula, is whale watching central. It lives and dies by tourism; every shop and restaurant was festooned with whale-watching knick-knacks: posters, coasters, ashtrays… It’s pueblito chiquitito that makes Gravenhurst, a pinprick town in cottage country, look like a bustling commercial centre (which it isn’t). The main strip is about four blocks long. It’s main attraction in summer are the beaches along those same four blocks, but in winter the only attraction is the wildlife that migrates to the region.
The tour day dawned grey and drizzly, but it didn’t matter; I was so psyched to see whales that it could have been grey and drizzly…oh wait, it was. The tour turned out to be a rickety and leaky white minivan driven by a young local who seemed to enjoy driving in the centre of the dirt roads, where the mud was sloshiest and the car skidded back and forth as if he was revving the engine on a patch of black ice. Mud water soaked our feet and the flooded the floor of the van each time he went through a puddle, and alas, I was more than a little damp by the end of the day.
The first stop was at a museum that included a skeleton of a right whale. It was massive, and it smelled nasty. I don’t remember the rest; I was too busy trying to keep the feeling in my fingers and toes.
Then we headed to Punto Pyramides, a collection of huts that serves as the takeoff point for whale watching. First we pulled on hats and gloves, then big ugly rain ponchos, then big bulky life vests. Then we climbed on to the boat, which was then pulled out to the water by this weird machine I can only describe as something that must have been inspired by ET.
Then we saw the whales.
As they waved their tails, 40 cameras poised to capture the instant. All 40 mouths gasped and awed as the whales breached and jumped, sometimes even close enough to splash us watching from the boat. A baby whale swam under the boat. They were almost close enough to touch. It was awesome.
Then we trekked inside for a (delicious?) lunch at the local restaurant. The only thing on the menu: octopus (squid?) legs with very obvious suckers stewed in a yellowish sauce. I opted for the bread basket.
The other animals? They were pretty neat as well, but it was so windy that it was hard to take a good look. (Mother Nature’s safety device; had it not been for the wind pushing us back, I’m sure we would have almost walked off the cliff.) Seeing them from so high up meant that the sea lions looked like specks of black hopping around and lounging about. The marine elephants (I’m not even sure that’s the right name for them in English…ye gads, I’m losing my English!!) were mammoth behemoths. Even from afar, they were huge. From up closer, the were enormous and looked like fat beige sausages pinched together at either end, with flippers sticking out of the sides.
Then we drove back, through the wind and rain, through the puddles, fully soaked with mud water.
Bastards!! Part II
That was Puerto Madryn. In one day, I had seen the town and all there was to do there, so I decided to switch my ticket and return a day earlier to Buenos Aires. Let the nightmare begin. I knew from previous flying experience that Aerolineas charges $15p to change the ticket dates, but when I called and spoke to the only English speaking agent, I heard something very interesting.
First, I wasn’t booked on the flight. The agent in Buenos Aires had forgotten to reconfirm my ticket, and as it stood, I wasn’t going to get back. Then they wanted me to pay extra. Then if I wanted to change my ticket, I had to pay another fee based on a fare I never paid. All through this, the agent kept telling me that he had to speak to his manager and kept putting me on hold and leaving me hanging. Finally he told me that there was a mistake of some sort, lowered the fee, and rescheduled my flight. What should have been a 10 minute phone call stretched on for about 45 minutes, and by that time I was hungry, cranky, and ready to attack.
Tinseltown, for real
The next day, convinced that my flight was leaving that evening, I left Puerto Madryn and hopped on a bus to Gaiman, a tiny Welsh town not far from the airport, arriving just around lunchtime. Like most provincial cities, Gaiman shuts down for the lunch hours; you could collapse on the street at 1 pm, and they wouldn’t find you until they emerged from their houses at 3 pm.
I had time to kill, so I decided to walk to the end of town and back (a pitifully short distance). Past where the houses stopped was something that looked like a dinosaur made out of tin. Sure enough, it was. I had stumbled upon “El Desafio” what Lonely Planet calls “South America’s Disneyland.” A huge area about the size of a football (read: soccer) field was covered and decorated with painted plastic bottles, pop cans, a replica of the Taj Mahal made out of tin, and metal cutouts of dinosaurs. (At first I didn’t realize there was a whole trail; the parking lot had captivated me and I thought that was it.) It was incredible.
Even more incredible is that the person who made it is an 83-year-old retired man who spent 20 years working on this project and is still at it. And even more incredible still is that it doesn’t even register on the tourism office’s maps of the city.
Bastards, part III
I made it to the airport an hour before my flight left, figuring that it was plenty of time to sort out whatever kinks and errors Aerolineas had in store for me. Turns out it wasn’t enough. I handed the agent my ticket to check in. I had, in fact, been properly booked on the flight I wanted, but there was a catch. I had to pay a ridiculous fare to change the ticket, one the agent on the phone the night before hadn’t told me about.
To make a very long story much shorter, I’ll just say that after arguing for the better part of the hour, I finally made it on the plane, although just barely. Bargaining had brought the price down, and out of either frustration or sympathy the agent had waived the fee to change the tickets, although I still had to pay a chunk of money equivalent more or less to one day’s budgeting. The whole plane ride back to Buenos Aires, the words “bastardsbastardsbastards” kept running through my head…
I would wish bad things upon Aerolineas Argentinas, but I still have to fly with them once more next week…
