Peninsula Valdes

We returned today from Puerto Madryn and Peninsula Valdes, in the province of Chubut which is a part of Patagonia. We took an eighteen-hour bus ride down and a two hour flight back. The former was wonderful as an adventure and as a way to see the endlessly flat plains of the Pampa, and understand a little of the powerful mythology that grew up (or was invented) around this stark landscape of cows and sheep and fields and fields and fields. The latter was fast and better on Eve's back.

There was so much to see on Peninsula Valdes, a huge nature preserve that is home to sea lions and penguins, seals and orcas, and the southern right whale, all of whom come here to breed in the rich and calm waters off of the Peninsula. But I found two experiences capture the range of feelings I had there.

We ended a long Sunday trip around Peninsula Valdes with a whale-watching expedition into the Golfo Nuevo, just off of Puerto Piramides. The trip began with the usual caveats from the leaders about how this isn't an aquarium and we can't guarantee what we will see, etc. etc. This leads to much snapping of photographs (by yours truly included) at the first, distant sight of a puff of steam from a whale. But before we knew it, we found ourselves being

investigated by two pairs of right whales, two mothers and their two newborns. (A newborn clocks in at a ton, so don't imagine some cutesy little dolphin-child). It was truly astonishing: the whales came right up to the boat, pulled their heads out and looked us right in the eye. They blew steam out of their spouts, dove under the boat, came around again, and peered at us. When one of the mothers went down in search of food, the young whale flopped on its back and slapped the surface of the water with its flippers, playing while waiting mother's return. It was remarkable. We floated out into this steel blue bay on a spring afternoon and found ourselves playing with these majestic creatures. I was entranced.

The next day we decided to walk from our hotel in downtown Puerto Madryn to the Ecocenter, a museum about the environment of the region. This took us along the long arc of the beach road. Before long we were drawn to the two-hundred-yard wide beachfront and settled into one of the great joys of the world, that must be as old as humans -- wandering the beach looking for shells and animals, feeling the firm wet sand under one's feet, listening to the endless hiss of the water finally meeting land. I thought immediately of summer's at Uncle Walter's house on Nantucket, and Long Beach Island and Woods Hole with the Weinbaums, and San Diego on a late February evening four years when we unexpectedly found ourselves running from the waves and glorying in the sunset. The feeling I had here in Puerto Madryn was so different that the day before, where my heart thumped with excitement (and my camera trigger finger could not stop firing away). Here, it was a sense of settled satisfaction, of feeling the rich beauty of this common ground, between water and land. We walked a mile on this line that disappears and reappears every twelve hours, feeling our own personal pleasure. And because the experience has changed so little over the millennia, I couldn't help but feel so powerfully linked to an ancient, elemental pleasure.