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In an effort to make up time we had skipped Argentina's San Juan region, only to realize that it contained a National Park we really wanted to visit. So we traveled 400km back north to the town of San Agustin de Valle Fertil.
San Agustin de Valle Fertil is a small town surrounded by scrub land that acts as a gateway to the Ischigualsto National Park. We know it was going to be small when we boarded the bus because the parcels being loaded had only someone's name and the town's name, no street names were needed.
We arrived in the evening and arranged to go on an excursion to Ischigualsto the next morning and seeing as there was another national park just over the state border, we booked onto that one too. Then a friendly Czech guy said he was organizing a BBQ if we wanted in. We said yes and eat great steakes and drank fine wines for the rest of the night.
The next morning we headed off to the extra park first. Not having any real idea what Talampaya National Park was about meant that the wind carved rock formations came as a pleasant
surprise, but the ancient rock art was a real treat.
Thousands of years ago people had recorded their journey over the Andes mountains by chipping out pictures on the same rock we were now looking at. With the help of our guide the patterns became mountains and the blobs became Lamas.
In the afternoon we went to Ischigualsto National Park (Valle de la Luna) which has been the site a many dinosaur bone discoveries. The landscape itself is barren and moon like. We saw strange rock balls that grow up to 3 meters wide due to their magnetic core and rock formations that looked impossible.
That night/morning we got the 3am bus out of town and made our way down to Malargue which is an area for skiing and has the worlds highest concentration of volcano cones in the near-by Parque Provincial Payunia.
Our trip to Parque Provincial Payunia seemed to take forever and just as I was getting a little sick of the drive the landscape changed and the earth turned black. About 700 years ago a volcano had erupted and thrown out dust that condensed in the cold Andes winds and fell to
earth as small black pellets of rock that covered everything to a depth of 7 meters. A few hardy plants had tried to recolonize the land but mostly it was just black. Larger lumps of rock were scattered around where huge blobs of lava had landed and cooled.
We walked around the black lava dunes and up onto the ridge of one of the extinct volcanos. When we were out of the wind the silence was overwhelming. The was nothing there to make a noise, absolutely nothing, so all you could hear was your own breathing.
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