Bahia Blanca

After an overnight bus ride I arrived early morning to Bahia Blanca. I’d already at this point decided to move on and get myself to Mendoza and bought my ticket to the next city along the way –  Neuquen. The
bus there was another overnighter, so it actually worked out nice to spend the
day in Bahia Blanca instead of catching another bus straight away.

The Tourist Information centres in Argentina are top notch, absolutely the best I’ve ever come across. And thankfully too, as the Lonely Planet is about 4 years out of date and woefully inaccurate, particularly with hostels, most of which have
closed down due to Argentinas poor ecomony. The guy in the tourist information
gave me a good map of the city and pointed me to across the road to a shop that
I could store my back pack with for only 15 pesos. Map in hand I set off to the
cities main square.

There’s a good reason not to stay here; there really isn’t a lot to do and it’s not city with an obviously good restaurant scene. Still, it was pleasant enough to walk
around for the day and not be on a bus, down a few coffees in a café where the
waitress was rather rude in correcting my Spanish – or Castillo as it is here
in Argentina. The low point however was a visit to their zoo.

They have a huge park that includes a free zoo. Which at face value is really cool, until you visit it and see how desperately sad the animals appear to be. The lions
seemed content in just lounging around in their pen, but it was when I arrived
at the monkey enclosure that I got a little depressed. Even though their home
wasn’t awful, they clearly were not happy little monkeys. I got the impression
that one monkey was trying to help him/her escape the captivity, and in another
enclosure one of the monkeys came over to the fence, turned its back on me then
prompted urinated. I don’t speak monkey, but I was pretty sure that was an
insult!

What finally made me leave to park and head back to the bus terminal was the visit to the guanaco. A guanaco is a descendant of the alpaca and llama, but oddly with a kangaroo head. They have the same curious disposition the llama has, in that they’ll just stare at you with their giant orb eyes. So when I arrived at his pen the guanaco walked over to the fence and we began a staring competition. It’s an impossible competition to win, these animals are born to stare down anything on the planet, so after a minute or so I decided this was stupid and looked away – at which point the guanaco made his move. He leapt at the fence, which I jumped back from convinced it would clear it, and then spat at me!! I’m pretty sure I had lost some guanaco dominance test and as I made my way from the pen, he walked around the pen keeping an eye on me and spitting a few more times just to drive the point home.

Back at the terminal I chilled out for a few hours waiting for the bus, contemplating losing a masculinity test with a llama/kangaroo. Soon enough (well not really, I was there for about 4 hours) I was on the bus headed for Neuquen, the capitol of the Lakes District.

Neuquen

Showers are a great wonderful thing. You don’t appreciate a shower until you’ve been on buses for two nights in a row. I was in desperate need of a shower and a decent sleep. While the Argentinian buses are great and mostly comfortable, nothing really beats an actual bed to sleep in. So once I had arrived in Neuquen I
started my walk towards the centre of town to find a place to stay.

After about 45 minutes I realised I was walking in the wrong direction – I had read the map wrong and had turned right from the bus terminal instead of left, effectively walking in the complete opposite direction to the centre. After cursing myself I about faced and wearily made my way in the correct direction.

I wasn’t planning on staying in Neuquen for more than the night. Once again, it’s a city that doesn’t hold a lot of tourist appeal, but it did remind me greatly of La
Serena in Chile. The climate was getting better and it’s actually a nice city.
Honestly, it could have been the fact I’d been on buses the past two nights,
but I decided to stay here for two nights and just enjoy a room that wasn’t a
dorm, drink great coffee in the morning (while watching the Olympics, with an
unsurprisingly Argentinian focus) and enjoyed two-for-one Jameson whiskey in an Irish bar I stumbled upon.

After two days I felt human again and said my goodbyes to the awesome two elderly chaps that ran the residential I was staying in. It was time to visit Argentinas wine region, and the famous city of Mendoza where Malbec red wine is internationally renown.