Advertisement
Published: July 22nd 2008
Edit Blog Post
The Submarine
Parque Nacional Ischigualasto After dozing for three quarters of the journey to San Agustin, I woke up to find a landscape of rocky hills with a light covering of trees, and a welcome appearance of cacti. There was an unexpected selection of accommodation touts at the bus station in San Agustin, but I was soon in a pleasant pension that was half the price of anywhere else I've stayed in the country.
San Agustin definitely warrants the use of the adjective "sleepy", its spacious main square tranquil and dotted with bird crap-peppered benches. The squawking of bright green parrots filled the quiet in between the infrequent passage of cars whose silencers had long since ceased to function. The nearby reservoir reflected the cloud-smeared blue sky and surrounding hills, and the temperature was back in the T-shirt range.
The point of coming to San Agustin was to visit two national parks in the vicinity - Ischigualasto (aka Valle de la Luna aka Valley of the Moon) and Talampaya. I was assured that I would be able to do a combined tour of the two of them the following day, a promise which was broken shortly after midnight when a repeated pounding on my
Cactus close-up
Parque Nacional Ischigualasto bedroom door disturbed me from a light slumber, and I was informed that the Talampaya leg had been cancelled due to lack of interest.
Ischigualasto is a desert, and home to the remains of some of the oldest known dinosaurs. It is unique in the world in that its rocks represent all stages in the Triassic era (i.e. the period, bookended by major extinction events, that saw the first flowering plants and first flying vertebrates) in an undisturbed sequence. However the landscape is the main draw for non-palaeontologists, with rock formations going by the evocative names of the Worm, the Submarine, and the Mushroom, plus some striped dome-like hills that reminded me of the Bungle Bungles.
Unfortunately the tour took place either side of midday, the worst possible time for either viewing or photographing the scenery. Language issues aside, I also had no interest in being lectured to by the mandatory guide at points along the way - I much prefer to be given a pamphlet which I can read and reread at my own pace. Finally, the landscape just didn't do it for me - the park may be noteworthy for its historical value but I didn't
feel it had warranted the detour.
Further investigations re Talampaya revealed that it would be difficult to get to "because of the farmers". I was unable to get this enigmatic explanation expanded upon, but I can only assume the various strikes and blockades that have been taking place in recent months have somehow had an impact on access to the park. Whatever, I resigned myself to not seeing it.
There were limited options for getting out of San Agustin, with a thrice-weekly 3AM bus to La Rioja being the only alternative to returning to San Juan at a more sociable hour of the day. Unfortunately the advice I'd been given in my pension that I could simply turn up at the bus station at departure time and get a ticket back to San Juan because "the bus is never full" was bogus, and in fact the ticket-seller told me that on a Sunday "the bus is always full", so I was forced to spend an extra night in San Agustin before heading back to San Juan and jumping on the first available night bus to Salta.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.052s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 11; qc: 25; dbt: 0.0325s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb