The wind pressed hard on the fabric and rocked the tent violently early this morning before I got up and as I write, I worry my tent won't be able to withstand the wind if the wind gets any stronger. All afternoon long, a haze blew in from the desolate brown hinterland which rises behind the coastal city.

At eleven o'clock I set off south from the ACA (Auto Club Argentino) campsite and battled with crosswind as I cycled on a sandy track five kilometres to a clifftop viewing point: Ponto Lomo, to see the sealion and cornet colonies there. A young couple arrived in a hire-car just after me; the man took a keen interest in my bike and my tour. We chatted by the safety railings on the clifftop. They told me they're from Rosario and he said he'd cycle-toured near home and in the Patagonian lake district. He asked to interview me, film me with his camcorder which I obliged as I couldn't think of any reason why not.

After lunch of pizza at a seafront pizzaria I spent two hours in a museum at Ponto Cuevas, a kilometre round the beach-front from the centre, where the wind outside sounded like it could rip the roof off any moment. On the promemtory nearby there's a scrupture of a Tehuelche warrier looking out over the bay with an inscription: The original inhabitant. There's also a plact in the pavement, put there in 1965, comemorating a centenary, as it was on the beach below that the ship Mimosa which sailed from Liverpool made landfall on the 28th of July 1865; a date celebrated in local street and place names, when the first Welsh colonists came ashore. The caves they'd hued out of the soft rock up from the beach and sought shelter to wait out the Winter, were rediscovered a number of years ago. The museum's exhibits puts together a picture of their stuggle for survival those first months on the desolate Patagonian shore; how they'd to probe inland in search of drinking water. It wasn't the green pleasant land promised them back in Wales. Instead it was desert. Eventually when Spring arrived with clement weather, they ventured inland and marched south in search of the Chubut river, the location of the section of land given them by the Argentine government.