Thar be Whales

So, yesterday was the first of many excursions that we will be doing in the next few weeks. Excursions are the bane of many backpacker type travelers because they are not cheap! 

On the other hand, if you want to see stuff, you pretty much have to cough up the sheckles. Yesterday we went to visit Reserva Faunistica Peninsula Valdez. It is in the calm shallow waters here that the Southern Right Whale population comes to breed and raise their young.

Well, if you are going to spend money to see whales, you pretty much can’t go wrong on this trip. You are guaranteed to see them, the only question is how close. For us the answer was very close. We started off with just a few whales, close enough for pictures, but still a bit far off. In no time though we had whales and their calves on every side of the boat, as well as going under it! Now from living in California, I’ve seen plenty of grey whales, some pretty close, but never anything like this. We saw spyhopping, tail slapping, and full on breaching. Most of it right by the boat where you get a real appreciation for their size.

We also got a pretty good feel for the size difference between calves and moms, and watching the mom’s giving them “exercises” to practice breathing ect… We also learned a bit more about them because of the guides we had, another plus for excursions. Overall, the whole thing met or exceeded our expectations!

We saw other wildlife during the trip as well. Things like guanacos, rheas, and maras, all of which I will talk about in a future blog, hopefully by then I will have some better pictures. I we post one photo of the penguins though. We stopped off at a small colony nest site of Magellenic penguins. These we will see in much greater numbers on our next excursion, so I’ll post more then!

One last word on excursions; they are a necessary evil in certain areas. In our case they are a given for much of the first part of the trip. That affects our perspective of how expensive the trip is. Right now, Argentina definitely feels expensive to us and we are starting to tone down from our decadence of the first few days and look for strategies to keep things cheaper. It will be awhile however before we really know how far our money can take us. We have to bull through the first part, and get to where we have a more relaxed pace over in the Andes, and then see how the flow of money is. A ver. It is one of the major differences between travel and vacations though. In vacations you usually have more money then time, so it’s all about time management. For travel though, you have more time then money, so to do the things you want to do, everything becomes a trade off where money is the important factor.