Look, ma! I’m driving standard!

From Buenos Aires, we booked it south by bus for 18 hours, through the flat endless cattle country that supply the indecently well-marbled bife de chorizo steaks heftily gracing so many Argentine dinner plates, to the coastal wildlife bonanza that is the Peninsula Valdez. Home to colonies of fur seals, elephant seals, sea lions, magellanic penguins, orcas, Commerson’s dolphins,  and countless species of birds, this is where those nature documentaries are filmed where killer whales drive themselves up onto the shore at top speed to try to snare seal pups for dinner. It’s also home to one of the most significant populations of Right whales in the world, so called because their friendly personality and tendency to float when dead made them the favourite target of whalers for centuries.

We were not there at the right time for the spectacle of Orca vs Seal, alas [the climax of which is both inevitable and grisly, according to some photos we saw], but we were there when the right whales were nursing their calves, and took a tour boat to see them. We got within maybe fifteen feet of probably a dozen different mom-n-baby pairs, who seemed completely unperturbed by our presence. It was awesome.

Mom and baby right whales, at medium distance (maybe 100ft away).

But the big news from the peninsula is that I managed to get us there, around, and back in a rented manual-shift car. This was a pretty big accomplishment given I had three hours of pre-trip instruction as my lifetime total experience driving a manual car, and was a little nervous about a) doing it for real, b) doing it in the land of momentum-alone-decides-intersection-priority, and c) having an audience (a sympathetic one, but still…). But the town where we rented the car (Puerto Madryn) was very sparsely trafficked, greatly easing our escape; and the roads to and in the peninsula itself were all relatively flat and more importantly deserted for long stretches at a time. I only stalled a couple of times (per day) and only lurched into motion a little more frequently than that. Also, our hostel staff’s unslicited advice to treat unpaved roads like snowy roads was invaluable, given that all of the roads on the peninsula itself (as opposed to the highway to get there) were unsealed, and both people and guidebooks stress the dangers of driving them After Weather. Luckily for us the weather had come and gone just prior to our arrival there, and when we were out and about the roads were all pretty dry again.

Only once did I completely fail to realize an objective, and that was moving the car from one parking spot to another in Puerto Piramides, where the whale tours were based and where we stayed for a night; this involved starting on a steep hill and gaining enough speed over a very short distance to make it over a pretty steep and very uneven dirt embankment into the hostel’s proper parking area. This failure was without either internal or external witnesses, however, making it much easier to endure and then accept. It also made it much easier to swallow my pride and avoid trying again, since another attempt could conceivably be witnessed and judged should another pair of eyes wander by, and so I chose the easier option of just rolling backwards down the hill a ways and entering the parking area via another less tricky entrance.

The final moment of trepidation was when we returned the car to the rental agency – I feared that the owner, as he checked out the vehicle’s condition by playing with the shifter and revving the engine some, would discover some mortal wound I’d inflicted to the gears or clutch through rookie error. But either the car would die a slow death after our departure, or I managed to avoid mangling its innards after all, because he finished his checks,  walked us inside to where we dealt with the return-of-rental paperwork, and let us go on our way.