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.