Our Trip to Patagonia
My daughter is obsessed with penguins and one of her dreams is to see them up close. I knew that our last trip while we are here needed to be special so I booked a trip and we headed out. Come with us to explore in Patagonia!
Our Trip to Patagonia | Day 1
If you can believe it, when I booked this trip, I actually didn't realize that we were going to be in Patagonia! We stayed in Puerto Madryn, which is near the Valdez peninsula on the East coast of Argentina. Once we were there, I discovered that we were in Patagonia, which I was really excited about!
The first day we were supposed to go on a penguin excursion, but there had been so much rain that they asked us to push to the next day. We agreed to do that and we went down to Trelew instead. Trelew is home to some incredible dinosaur fossils, including the longest dinosaur ever discovered in the world so we needed to visit the dinosaur museum!
Our little excursion to Trelew only took the morning. We went back to Puerto Madryn and put my son down for a nap. While he napped, my daughter and I went seashell hunting on the beach since the tide was out. We found so many cool seashells, which was so fun and an easy activity that we were able to take home with us.
After my son woke up, we drove to Peninsula Valdez, where we went to Isla de los Parejos or the “Island of the Birds”. It's a little "island" out in the water that isn't actually an island because it's still connected to the water. There's a replica of a church built here, but mostly this island is home to a ton of different birds. Including some penguins, which we saw with the telescope.
Our Trip to Patagonia | Day 2
The second day was our much anticipated penguin excursion! We booked the excursion through El Pedral. They took us first to Punta Ninfas, where we went and saw a lighthouse and the cliffs, which were absolutely stunning and then we went down to the penguin colony.
They had to drop us off away from the beach, so we had to walk two kilometers each way, but it was fine because we saw penguins everywhere! I would say we saw a few hundred penguins. They were in their nests and walking around and we were able to get super close to them.
We weren't allowed to touch them, because they are wild animals, but they were not scared of us at all. We tried to keep a healthy distance for the most part, but some of them got within a few inches of us. We could also see into their nests and got glimpses of some of the baby chicks that had just hatched. We had a little bit of a hard time keeping the baby away from the nests because he was super excited for the holes in the ground. He wasn't super interested in the penguins other than trying to herd dog them like a dog but my daughter loved every second of it.
When we had looked our fill, we went back to the ranch in El Pedral and had a beautiful lunch they provided for us. After lunch, we had a little tour of the house there. They offered us Welsh tea and cake afterwards, that I unfortunately couldn't eat, but the entire experience was incredible!
Our Trip to Patagonia | Day 3
The next day, we decided to explore Peninsula Valdes. We got in the car and our first stop was Punta Piramides which is about an hour and a half from Puerto Madryn. Despite the very windy weather, we were still able to see a bunch of sea lions which the kids loved. We ended up only a few minutes away from Puerto Piramides, which is a teeny, tiny little town where we stopped for lunch at a little local place that was incredible! They had gluten gluten free crackers for me and the baby to start off with and then my husband had the lamb and I had the lemon fish, which was the best fish I've ever had in my entire life.
After we were done eating, we took a long drive to Punta Norte, which is at the very top of Peninsula Valdez. We stopped to see sea lions and elephant seals. It was not nearly as windy here as it was in the first few places that we stopped, which I found really interesting. Apparently this is a good place to see orcas depending on the season though we did not see any, which was sad for me since that is one of my bucket list items.
On our way up to Puerto Norte, we saw signs for San Lorenzo, which is the home of the largest magellenic penguin colony in the world. We were able to visit a working sheep farm and got to see all of the sheep with all of the stacks of wool they'd already shaved from the sheep. We then had the chance to go on another hour and a half to two hour penguin excursion which we jumped on because we were here to see penguins. We had an incredible guide that took us around and we able to see an armadillo, and a Nandu or a Raya, which is a Patagonian ostrich and is something I have never seen before.
We started seeing the penguins which were mixed in with sheep as well. Apparently one of the fences broke and sheep had gotten into the penguin colony. When I said this is the largest magellenic penguin colony in the world, the size difference between this one and the one that we saw at El Pedral was insane. I would say the El Pedral colony is maybe a fourth the size of this one.
We were told this colony goes two kilometers south and four kilometers north. Meaning even though we saw probably a thousand penguins, we still only saw a small portion the colony. We saw a lot more chicks here than our previous excursion and learned that they can get to almost full size after only 10 or so days!
Like before, we were able to get very close to these penguins. I had to keep a tight grip on the baby because he just wanted to dive right into those nests. We had a much shorter walk down to the beach than we did at El Pedral because the Jeep was able to get closer to the beach. We saw so many penguins on the beach. They had a whale bone skeleton that the kids were allowed to play in, which kept them entertained and kept the baby from trying to run into the ocean.
Then they took us back to San Lorenzo and we went back to Puerto Madryn after that because it was about a three hour drive. The the next day we got up and flew back to Buenos Aires.
It was an exhausting trip but it was absolutely incredible and a once in a lifetime experience. We loved every minute of it and I know the kids made some serious core memories from this trip.
