Walking with Dinosaurs

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Day 12 - Sunday 23rd October 2011(Contd)
We sat down in the hotel dining room sinking a few beers whilst catching up on travel blog and checking our emails. On our first trip to Egypt 11 years ago we had no mobile phone but used phone cards at phone booths and not only did we not have a laptop but we only used the internet café 4 times. This time seems so different having so much communication at our finger tips and also being able to book hotel rooms as well.
When it got to about 7 we decided to head into town and see if we could find anything open. We ended up having a mini hotdog from a shop that was hidden down a laneway. I think we were a bit of a novelty to the guys running the shop and we got personnel service with the creation of our small but extremely tasty hotdog.
We just knew that once again we would be having a late dinner and that’s why we grabbed an entrée (hotdog), and sure enough it was nearly 9.30 before we found a restaurant that was open. Waddled home about midnight once again with a very full stomach, we are thinking of changing the main meal to lunch and just having a light snack for dinner. The food is nice but there is a lot of pizza and pasta on all the menus, so I feel a bit cheesed out, and we are still struggling with such late night dinners.

Day 13 – Monday 24th October
Breakfast was great it was a buffet with fruit salad a nice change from croissants which of course were present. Today we are getting the overnight bus to Rio Gallegos, so we asked the hotel to mind our backpacks and see what the town has to offer. The first stop is Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio, which contains the most important fossil finds in Patagonia. The staff are very friendly and explained the best way to view the museum, it is extremely well laid out and the displays are great, there is even a viewing area for the lab where they are working on the dinosaur bones.
When we walked out of the museum the temperature outside had dropped to 12 degrees and we were freezing, Scott only had a T-Shirt on and I only had a light long sleeve shirt. We needed to find somewhere warm really quickly, so we went in search of a restaurant for lunch and so the eternal search for food continues. We chose one of the few ones open and it was average but filled the hole but more importantly it was warm inside, the only issue was we were pretty sure horse was on the menu so we were very careful ordering. We sat there as long as we could before facing the cold again, Trelew is only a smallish town well let’s be honest there is not a lot to see. So we headed to the only other site to see Museo de Artes Visuales which features artists from the region, there was some very interesting pieces and one in particular caught our eye. We may have normally only spent 15 minutes walking around what was basically a converted house looking at the artwork but today we padded that out to almost an hour, because it too was lovely and warm inside. “yes the brush strokes on this piece are rather wonderful and remind me of the work of Renoir, I must pause here and allow the artist to speak to me via his canvas” In other words “its bloody freezing outside and I don’t want to go back out there just yet”
Perplexed as to what to do next we went to a café for a coffee and ended up with a cappuccino (was lost in translation), the Argentinian Caps are weak so we have been avoiding them. We spent over two hours in the café before deciding to go back to the hotel dining room to wait out the rest of time in town.
Grabbed the backpacks and walked to the bus station for our 8.15pm bus out of town. On our original plan our next stop was going to be the town of Comodoro Rivadavia, which was about a 5 hour bus journey. What we were discovering on our trek down the coast of Argentina was that very few international tourist travel here and perhaps for good reasons. The towns are lovely and the people great but there isn’t a lot to fill a day, and this is made all the worse by the midday shutdown of everything. The cost of everything is much higher as well with most things almost double what is quoted in the Lonely Planet. Hotels and restaurants can always be relied upon to be a higher price than what is quoted in the LP, but bus tickets and museums rarely are, but in Argentina everything has jumped in price. Because of this we opted to skip Comodoro Rividavia and take a 17 hour overnight bus trip to Rio Gallegos. I mean we really weren’t going to miss anything at Comodoro, which has as its main attraction the “Museo Nacional Del Petroleo”….you guessed it, The National Museum to Petrol. The obvious question would be why would you have a museum to petrol, but the one that pops in to my mind is that it is a national museum, so I wonder if there is regional museums to petrol. Anyway as hard as it was giving up the opportunity of looking at large storage containers of petrol we decided to give it a miss
At the bus terminal around 8.05 we walked out to where the buses pull up and waited and waited. Finally we went back inside to ask at the sales counter if there was a problem, and a one armed man who was standing nearby and who had no official uniform on grabbed our tickets and took off with them. Unfortunately you do get paranoid when travelling, especially around bus and train stations that are notorious for pick pockets and Scott was just about to crash tackle him when we discovered all he just wanted was a place to lean on so he could write a new time which was 23.00hrs. The lady behind the ticket counter said 22.00 - Oh damn what is going on, and as we waited other buses from different companies came and went and the majority were Don Otto buses. Scott had picked Don Otto as the one we should use of the two choices we had but I was worried because it sounded like a company that should be making Bavarian Salami not running buses through Argentina. We ended up choosing Andersmar buses…big mistake. All night while we waited for our bus and Don Otto’s buses came and went Scott just had to keep reminding me, “ oh look another Don Otto bus” became a bit annoying after a couple of hours.
After an hour of sitting in this bus station we started looking at the people that had been there as long as us and giving them nicknames so we knew who we were talking about. We were pretty sure hair extension girl (these were plaited braids down to her bum) and the young guy with an ear plug earring were going to be on our bus. Then there was the lady with the red jacket we were not sure about, and of course the man with one arm kept popping in and out, so that it soon started to feel like a scene from Twin Peaks, the only thing missing was the log lady, although I may have slotted into that role – the crazy part. We kept a close eye on these people because we could not understand the announcements. You know how muffled they are at home add the fact they are in Spanish – no chance, so we kept a close eye on these long term people so if they moved so would we. About 22.00 the braided girl and red coat moved so we took off to the buses followed by ear plug guy, who looked as confused as us. Scott saw the man who had given us the revised time earlier who by now we had worked out was a baggage handler so he asked if this was our bus, but of course it wasn’t. Another bus turned up and we lost braided girl and red coat to this bus. Back inside ear plug guy went back up to the ticket counter to ask and the look and the Noooo from him made us very concerned that things could get worse. A little later the lady behind the counter came up to us and we thought she was trying to tell us 3.00am the blood ran from our faces , she finally wrote the time down and it was only 23.30 and she pointed to two men near ear plug and said (well we think) stay with them.
The bus turned up at 23.15hrs so our baggage handler the one armed man was correct with the time and confirmed this was the correct bus for our 17 hours trip. It was a great relief after a 3 hour delay that we finally got underway, when you guessed it we had to stop for petrol so we didn’t get on the road till bout 12.30am. Exhausted and hungry we thought we would go to sleep but next thing a tray was shoved at us with dinner/Russian Roulette which consisted of spinach Lasagne with rice on the side. Yes we ate it and survived it and actually wasn’t too bad, on par with plane food. Shortly after having our past midnight feed they turned off the lights on the bus and we were able to doze off to sleep.

Day 14 - Tuesday 25th October 2011
Neither of us have ever been able to sleep on a plane when travelling but thankfully tonight we could get a bit of sleep on this bus. A couple of previous buses had only 3 seats across the width of the bus but this long haul one had 4, like a conventional bus. We did have a bit more leg room and the seats did recline a fair bit, but it wasn’t the “cama” or bed seats we had been told we were getting but in fact “semi cama”…once again something was lost in translation.
We both dozed in and out all night, with poor Shelley just about freezing to death, till the sun came up and turned our bus into an oven. Around 9 we got served breakfast which consisted of a chocolate biscuit and a cup of tea. The bus ploughed on through and endless flat scrubby landscape divided by equally endless barbed wire fencing. Stopped at a few towns, one thankfully for at least twenty minutes so we could get off and stretch our legs, and at another the police boarded to check the identity of only the women…another one of life’s little mysteries. In the afternoon the landscape started getting hilly and we crossed a few rivers, and just when we thought we were going to lose our minds we arrived at Rio Gallegos. It was 4.20 in the afternoon and we had been on that bloody bus for just under 17 hours; that was 4 hours longer than it took us to fly from Australia.
I was on the verge of delirium by the time we got off but dug down deep because our journey wasn’t over till we had a room. Whilst we were at the bus terminal, which was 5 kilometres out of town we picked up our tickets out of here for Thursday morning. We are getting quite good at this but most of it is done by writing down our destination and date we want to leave on a piece of paper and giving it to the ticket seller. A good dose of mangled Spanish and sign language is also required for any ticket purchase, but at the moment it is working well.
Got a taxi into town to our first choice of hotel and discovered they only had a room for one night instead of two. Never mind our second choice was only 4 blocks away, so we hoisted our back pack on and took off. At the second choice they didn’t have a room at all; oh well let’s try choice number three, that’s only 5 blocks away, so off we went. At choice number 3 they only had a room with a shared bathroom and the room was worse than appalling the front internal wall of the room facing the hall had large windows and glass in the door covered with lace curtain. I am not thinking there would be much privacy, if fact it looked like a viewing room for people walking down the hall. The LP quoted rate for this hotel was $AR80 for a night, but now they wanted $AR220 ($AUS50)…I told you inflation was bad in Argentina.
Now we were in a real pickle as there wasn’t a lot of other choices so decided that the only thing we could do was keep walking till we found something. Spotted another Hotel, but once again they only had a room for one night, so we moved on again. By this stage we had been walking for over an hour with our back packs and were close to completely exhausted when we spotted another hotel, which looked a bit out of our price range but had given up caring about costs.
Once again our lack of Spanish was a problem, and they initially told us they only had a room for one night but thankfully agreed to give us a room for the two nights. At $AR450 (AUS$100) a night it is at the top end of our budget but the room is perhaps the best we have got so far. It is large, sunny with a first class bathroom and an enormous bed. Finding this hotel was a real stroke of luck, and as soon as we got the room we jumped into the hot shower to wash away the stink of the long bus journey.
As soon as we were cleaned up we headed down to the hotel bar for a well deserved cold beer, and to plan the next few days. Around 8 we headed out to get a feed, would have gone earlier but from experience we knew nothing would be open. A few block away we discovered a pizza place that Shelley could get a chicken and salad dish and I managed to get a fairly nice steak. We are both so over the Argentinian obsession with pizza by now, but it is hard to get anything else on a budget. By this stage we both were crashing fast and I discovered that I somehow had put both my watch and Shelley’s on…on the same arm without realising it. Oh dear I think I needed to lay down. Managed to pay our bill and get home before I did anything sillier and crashed into our huge bed.

Day 15 – Wednesday 26th October
Both had a great night sleep and were up and down stairs for breakfast by 8.30. Soon discovered that although this hotel seemed perfect, its one downfall is its breakfast. Toast, croissants and cereal drowned in sugar was all they had to offer. I managed to get a shocking cup of coffee but poor Shelley couldn’t get a tea. There was no tea making facilities (a first ever for us) and when she asked the woman running the dining room for tea, the woman just looked at her and laughed. Spanish for tea is te, so I don’t think it was a language problem, I just think that maybe only silly people drink it down here.
After some confusing Spanglish we managed to organise our laundry, and then we headed off to see the sights of the city. Rio Gallegos has a population of 79,114 and sits on the coast, but like most coastal towns of Argentina, the shoreline is taken over by wharves, naval bases and heavy industry so it is best avoided. The premier attraction at Rio is the Plaza San Martin, which is basically a leafy park that takes up one block in the centre of the city. Not having spent time in a park since Sunday we were keen to see it so it was our number one priority. Spent a good ten minutes walking the park and enjoying watching the town’s dogs chase each other all over it before moving on in search of the second biggest attraction in town, the Museum to the Falklands War. We somehow got lost looking for it and when we did find it we discovered that it was closed …permanently. Likewise the other 2 nearby museums, one of which we found no trace of at all. Thankfully by this time it was lunchtime so we had at least something we could do and we knew of places that were open. Before getting there Shelley ran the gauntlet of the supermarket to pick up supplies for the bus trip tomorrow.
For lunch we went back to the restaurant we were at last night “Pizza Roma Express”, for a quick hamburger. Afterwards we spent some time window shopping. As this was siesta time most places were shut although some we had noticed had been shut all day. The clothes seem to be dearer down this end of the country which we thought maybe because of the distance. The town also has very few cafes and only one cake shop compared to Buenos Aires where there are about 2 on every corner.

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Comments

[Leo Valles]

wow
hi Scott, 3rd week here at Acrow and picking things up slowly so not bad for a rookie like me, anyway glad u r having fun there i've been to Rio Gallegos only on a stop over enroute to Sydney but that was 8 years ago now they go straight from Buenos Aires to Auckland then Sydney. anyway just a small tip when you travel by taxi in South America make sure they dont take u the long way around as they thing u r gringos and take more money off you, cheers Leo Valles