Heading to Puerto Madryn

We slept pretty well last night and could have slept longer had it not been for the 5.30am alarm! It was the first night in a long time that we didn't have to wear all our clothes and layer up with extra blankets! The bonus of being up at such a ridiculous hour was that we caught it the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean! We also saw a seal and, at quite a distance, a whale blowing!

I packed everything away while Mark went to organise breakfast. He did French toast and fresh orange juice, as well as the usual stuff. Several people said it was the best truck breakfast they'd had!

We were on the road by 7.30am. The aim today was to get to Puerto Madryn, 550 kilometres away! We were heading for an actual campsite where we would be staying for 2 nights, giving us a very welcome free day tomorrow on this epic drive!

To begin with, we enjoyed lovely ocean views (although I was sitting on the wrong side of the truck to take photos), but we were soon back to the same flat, featureless scenery as yesterday! This country has thousands and thousands of square miles of nothingness!

We drove for hour after hour as the temperature kept rising. By the time we stopped for a truck lunch at 2pm, it was 38 degrees, 13 degrees above the average for this area at this time of year!! We prepared a bean salad for lunch. Mark and I had our leftover bread and cream cheese, instead.

Back on the road, many of the people who had been complaining about the cold just a couple of days ago were now moaning that it was too hot! We're never happy, are we?

Suddenly, it went very dark and we drove through a cloud burst! It lashed it down for all of three or four minutes. Then it stopped, the sun came out again and it was hotter than ever!

A little later, we skirted the city of Trelew, one of the first Welsh settlements in Patagonia. It would have been nice to stop, but there was no time! We ploughed onwards.

To add to the weirdness of the weather, we then drove head on into a dust storm. The sky on one side of the truck turned a strange yellowy grey colour, whilst on the other side, it remained clear blue and sunny!

By the time we approached Puerto Madryn, we were in the middle of a full-on sandstorm with almost zero visibility! Fortunately, it cleared as we reached the coast.

We arrived at our campsite on the southern side of the town at about 5pm. It was very windy as we put our tents up, but it calmed down by before dinner. There was a small shop on site which sold cold drinks. They had a covered area where a few of us sat while we waited for the cook group to prepare our meal.

Dinner was chicken and vegetable pasta which was very tasty. There was a good sunset, but it was somewhat masked by clouds of smoke from a fire on the other side of town. This was the reason that none of us could have the shower we'd been looking forward to so much - the municipality had diverted the water to tackle the fire.Leia mais