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.