Peninsula Valdes

When Hadleigh and I stumbled upon an article that spoke of the opportunity to see Orcas during the month of March/April on Peninsula Valdes, we rearranged our travel plans to take a chance on this.

Orcas had unfortunately eluded us so far on our Antarctica cruise and we both have a great admiration for these incredibly smart and social animals. Not only can they be spotted on Peninsula Valdes, there are some known Orca families there, all lead by these incredibly experienced matriarchs, who have developed a unique hunting strategy that involves stranding themselves at great speed in order to catch a seal pup at the shore. This sounded too incredible (and yes, also brutal) to pass up, so we went. We stayed for some days at an estancia, whose owner is an absolute expert and orca fanatic and which is the base for many filmcrews (BBC, National Geographic etc) to come and document this incredible wildlife spectacle. We spent our days getting up before sunrise and sitting for hours on the beach staring at the ocean... but alas... no orcas :(

Whilst we were of course disappointed by this, its in the nature of wildlife observation to have to accept unpredictability and the peninsula still compensated us with some of the most incredible sunrises and cloud formations as well as loads of cute sea lion pups, birds, pelutos, sheep, guanaco etc. We also met some very interesting people who taught us so much about orcas, wildlife conservation, filmmaking and life in general.

Peninsula Valdes and the hunting Orcas of Punta Norte will definitely remain high on our bucket list and we hope to come back someday to shoot some orcas (with our camera of course).