To Puerto Madryn

After the tour of the El Chocon and the highlight visit to the paleontological lab, I was dropped off in the Neuquen bus station with a few hours to spare but no where to take a shower, though I did use the bathroom to change into pajamas (overnight bus trips are so much more enjoyable if you aren't wearing jeans). While I was waiting for the bus I met a girl going home from visiting her parents (she was going to Rio Gallegos, on the same route as Puerto Madryn), and we started talking. When I told her I was traveling, she lit up and started telling me about every town in Patagonia and why I need to visit. She sat behind me on the bus and we spent the first half hour of the ride brainstorming travel ideas. She told me I had to go to San Martin de Los Andes and do the Ruta de Siete Lagos, I had to visit Villa la Angostura and see the Bosqe de Los Arraynes, I needed to make my way to El Bolson and taste some of the best microbrewery beer in the country, I had to stop off in Esquel to see the Viejo Expreso Patagonico, etc. At some point though, exhaustion caught up with the both of us (she said "mis neuronas tienen sueno"), I turned back around, and we both fell asleep; I slept all the way to Puerto Madryn (and almost missed the stop; my friend behind me woke me up just in time).

Dinosaurs! (There will be dinos this time, I promise.)

In one of the few tour agencies left open, I sat with their representative and tried to find an available tour to one of the local dinosaur sites, but after many phone calls to numerous guides, we found out that whatever guides were not already occupied in giving tours were booked at some medical conference in the local conference center. They told me that is anything came up they would call me, so I left my phone number by the office and left to walk around the town, not very hopeful about my prospects of seeing dinosaurs. I strolled through the small park in the center of town, passing by its Islas Malvinas memorial, to the only museum (art), planning to spend a few hours there. It was Monday, so it was closed. I was, however, able to (finally) find a phone card, so I was able to recharge my cell. It was a good thing too, because, unexpectedly, my phone started ringing. The tour office found one guide who was free, and who was willing to take me on a private tour of El Chocon. The price was a bit steep (being on my own), but I was able to bring it down a bit, and I decided that, being on vacation, and having one opportunity in my life to see real fossils in a non-museum environment, money would be no object (and in all honesty it wasn't a break-the-bank sum). I sat down at the Islas Malvinas memorial and ate my lunch while I waited for the tour guide to come pick me up in her 4x4.
The guide was this rugged local lady who spoke a decent English, and all the way out to the first site (a 45 minute drive) we spoke Argentine politics (that is, she spoke and I asked questions; Argentines hate their government, which, it seem, could give certainly Israeli officials a lesson in corruption). When we got to the paleontological lab (that's right, I got to go to a lab!) we stepped out of the car and I immediately got a taste of the Patagonian wind. Anything that wasn't firmly attached to our bodies were blown off, and I had to chase after my kippah and put it in my pocket for the duration of the trip. The surrounding were gorgeous; the town, the museum, and the lab were right near a man-made lake (they dammed the river) of the deepest and richest blue I have ever seen, surrounded by red-rocked cliffs. Check out the pictures:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2083221&id=43906579&l=41d09e5357
Anyway, back to the lab...
I got to go into a paleontological lab with my guide and two real live paleontologists, where there were shelves full of fossils, tagged and IDed, and a WHOLE ABELOSAURUS SKELETON that they just excavated. We must have spent an hour in their while the paleontologists explained everything in an excellent command of English. I was like a kid in a candy shop.
After the lab we went to the Museum, which was neat, and we drive down to the lake and dam, where Iguanodon footprints are usually visible through the water, but the wind was very strong a disturbed too much sediment to get a view. At that point, however, I couldn't care. I got to go into an active paleontological lab and handle real fossils. I could have died happy.
The guide drove me back to the bus station, where I picked up my stuff and got on the bus to Puerto Madryn.

Dinosaurs!

I landed in Neuquen and the minute I got off the plane, I got a taste of the infamous Patagonian winds, winds that reach very high speeds and can come out of no where. I was able to feel the wind right off the plane because, instead of the usual makeshift tunnel one walks through to get from the plane to the terminal, we exited the plane right onto the tarmac and walked across the tarmac to the small airport the old-fashioned way. The airport was a bit outside of town, but before grabbing a cab into town, I took a cab to the bus station and booked a ticket to Puerto Madryn on an overnight bus; Neuquen is not a touristy town for a reason and I did not want to spend too much time there. After successfully procuring a ticket and finding a secure place to leave most of my stuff, I went out to catch a cab to get into the city. When I got outside, there was a bit of a line of people waiting for cabs, which were only coming every five minutes or so. It was already almost 10 and I did not want to waste any more of the one day I had in town, so I went to a young fellow near the front of the line and asked him if he wanted to split a cab. He did, and so I met a fellow (I cannot remember his name now) who studied historiography and is now studying explosives in mining and taught himself English. We took the cab to the University where we got off and split paths, he to the University for a mining conference, and me to the tourist office. There is not much to do in Neuquen; the only thing my guidebook mentioned about Neuquen was that it is the paleontological capital of Argentina. There are no fewer than three separate places for dino-tourism near Neuquen, two of which have museums and paleontological labs and are the locations, respectively, of the biggest sauropod and the one of the largest carnotaurs ever found, and the other which has the only active paleontological dig open to the public. I found all this out at the tourist office, where they gave me a list of the tourist agencies that visit these sites, along with their numbers and addresses. As I did not have a working cell yet, I had to walk from tour office to tour office, only to find out that I was too late and whatever tours would have left to these places were long gone. I also learned something else about Patagonia: the country is so huge and everything is so far apart, that one really either needs a car or needs to hire a professional guide that has a car to see anything; usually public transportation to interesting sites outside of a town is non-existent.

Travels Part 1 - Preliminaries

As many of you many know, I have been absent from the blog these past two weeks because I have been traveling outside of Buenos Aires. I spent a few days in Iguazu, which I wrote about, and came back to Buenos Aires for one weekend before heading south. I will spend the next few blog posts writing about my time down south.
The weekend before I left was an exercise in Murphy's Law. I had scheduled a flight to Neuquen, a small and decidedly un-touristy town in Northern Patagonia, for the first leg of my trip, but because of its remote location and non-touristy nature, the flight was cheaper. Neuquen also happens to be a central bus hub, so getting to other places from Neuquen is easy. It also happens to be... Well, I am getting ahead of myself. Back to the pre-travel weekend. My flight was at 6 on Monday morning, which necessitated an early wake-up and some pre-planning (printing out boarding passes, calling a cab, and such). Unfortunately, my phone decided to run out of minutes on Sunday night, and a search of every locutorio and kiosk proved fruitless; no one had a refill card for my carrier. Then, the printer at the hostel broke, so I was not able to print out my boarding pass. I went to bed Sunday night (after the worst restaurant meal I have eaten in BsAs) with no way to order a cab and no way to print out my ticket. I decided to sleep and figure it all out in the morning.
The next morning I woke up very early (4:30), got my stuff together, and went (which I packed the night before)down to Avenida Luis Maria Campos, the nearest busy street, to flag a cab. Well, I learned that night that, as much as Buenos Aires is a rocking, stay-up-all-night city, it is not New York. There was not a single car on the road, let alone a cab. I stood there with my heavy travel pack and a prospect of missing my flight weighing me down, when, out of a parking space, a car without any lights on pulled out. It was a cab! I ran up to it and got him to take me to the airport. Check-in at the airport was a smooth as Argentine ice cream, and I got through security and to the gate an hour before take-off. Our plane would have made the inventor of sardine cans jealous; it seemed to be ergonomically designed to fit as many people into a tiny metal tube as possible, a far cry from the spacious coche cama buses that I took to Iguazu, with the 140 degree reclining seats and TVs and bathrooms (oh man, did I have to pee on that flight). It was only a three hour flight though, so before too long we were landing in the semi-arid and extremely windy town of Neuquen (pronounced Ne-ew-ken), which I found out, besides being a town with a tiny tourist industry and also a central bus hub in Patagonia, is also the Dinosaur capital of the country. However, my computer is acting up, so I will write more about the Dinos tomorrow.

I'm Back

I'm back in Buenos Aires from my traveling stage, and it was quite a week. I will be posting updates and stories about my travels as the days progress, but right now I am going to go to sleep. Buenas Noches.

This past weekend was very nice, even more than usual, as I really feel part of a few families here now. It is really nice to ear that people from and otherwise random place will miss you when you leave. Shabbos day was also a gorgeous day, the only one in an otherwise rainy weekend. Friday was terrible; it rained non-stop the entire day, and Sunday saw on and off unexpected downpours. I thought the weekend might have also seen some build-up of excitement for my then-impending trip down South, but I really felt nothing over the weekend. I think it is part of not having plans and playing things by ear; I am not really excited for tomorrow because I don´t even know what is happening in the next hour. The last few hours before the trip were not very comforting. My cell phone decided to run out of minutes at the worst possible time, and not a single kiosk or locutorio in my entire neighborhood had a recharge card of my carrier; I was digitally stranded. When I got back to the hostel from dinner at what was the worst kosher restaurant I have been to (I don´t want t talk about it), I found out that the printer in the hostel was broken and I could not print my e-ticket. I went to bed at 1, with my alarm set for 3 hours later, without any idea of what I would do in the morning, no way to call a cab, and no ticket.
In the morning, after a quick shower, I walked down to what is usually one of the busier streets; at 5 there was no one in the street. No one. I was ready to turn back and try, well, I am not quite sure what, when a car pulled out of a parking space. It was a cab! He was free! He took me to the airport with plenty of time to spare. At the airport the check-in desk just took my passport and got all of my information, and as soon as you can say Buen Viaje, I was in the air in a small cramped plane heading to Neuquen. I arrived in Neuquen (we got to walk across the tarmac!) and took a cab to the central bus station, where i bought a ticket for the Puerto Madryn that would leave in the evening. Meanwhile, I had the entire day to kill. I left the bus station only to find a bit of a line waiting for the occasional cab. I approached a younger looking local and asked if he wanted to share a cab, and so I made my first local friend, Carlos, the student of mining, explosives, and historiography.
My tour book said that Neuquen is one of the Dinosaur capitals of the south, and I decided I could not leave Neuquen without doing a Dino tour. Then I got to the tour offices, none of whom had tours on a Monday, especially as there was some big conference going on, taking up the time of most of the cities tourist workers. I walked from tour office to tour office with no luck. I will continue the story the next time I am by a computer, as I can barely keep my eyes open right now. Buenas Noches!