I´ve passed through Neuquén on the bus before on my way to Bariloche the first few days after I arrived in Argentina. It doesn´t seem like too impressive of a city, but the surrounding deserts are full of dinosaur fossils and I come back to explore these areas.
My bus arrives at 8am and I shove my huge heavy luggage into a locker and jump on the 8:30 bus to Villa el Chocón, home to one of the dinosaur museums outside of the city. The museum itself is tiny and gaudily decorated for Christmas, which I like. The fossils fail to amaze me, but what does amaze me are these funny dinosaur models that they have set up in the back room. To see them, you have to pass through these red velvet curtains, so it creates a very mysterious, David Lynch type atmosphere. One of the guides explains in broken English that they´re made by a local artist, I think he says out of garbage, but they don´t look like it, so I just cough it up to another thing lost in translation. Another guide shows me a video on her phone of one of the dinosaur models in the back of a pick up truck and it´s moving it´s head and tail and people and oo-ing and ahh-ing. They say to me¨"Here. December." I node my head and leave the museum.
I´ve got like 5 hours to kill until the bus back to Neuquén. There are some dinosaur footprints in situ by the edge of the lake. The locals used to use them are barbecue pits before they realized what they were. Unfortunately, they´re currently under the water level and not visible, but I decide to take a walk to the lake anyway and find a place to just kill some time.
I walk for about 45 minutes in the blazing desert heat and turn a lobstery shade of red. I find a shady rock outcropped overlooking the lake. I sit in the shade and spend a very pleasant 4 hours reading, listening to music and eating these tasteless crackers that I got at the bus station.
I head back to town and wait for the bus back to Neuquén. I meet a Swiss surfer-motorcyclist at the bus station who is heading to another museum about an hour away. There´s no bus there, but he´s just going to get out along the side of the road and try to find a ride. The bus pulls up and he asks if I´m going to come with him. I hear adventure calling so I say sure.
We get off the bus at a roundabout in the middle of nowhere. It´s been about 10 minutes and not one car has passed. Uh-oh. We start throwing rocks at a broken bottle by the side of the road to pass the time. After another 10 minutes or so, a truck pulls up and slows down for us. The Swiss is fluent in Spanish, so he goes and talk to him and then opens the doors and waves to me to hop in.
The Argentine driver is very talkative, but I can´t understand anything he´s saying because my Spanish isn´t very good and all the windows are completely open and I feel like I´m in a wind tunnel. The Swiss interprets for me and says that someone tried to steal his car yesterday and that´s why there are no windows. We pass two dead cows on the side of the road. Apparantly someone drove by and got annoyed that they were in the way, so pulled a gun out and shot them. There are definitely some interesting people and stories down here and I wish I spoke better Spanish.
He drops us off at the museum, home to a life sized Gigantosaur skeleton. As the name implies, it is quite large, the largest in the world. Aside from dinosaurs, the museum also has a local art exhibit (yay, more good/bad art!) and some objects of local historical interest, such as the first computer and printer in town, an old office from like the 40´s and old medicial equipment. Our tour guide speaks halting English and closely follows us around the museum. She´s nice, but we find her a little overbearing at this point.
We´re ready to leave and she tell us that the bus back to town runs every half hour and will pick us up in front of the museum. We wait for an hour and a half and no buses pass. We try to get a ride, but no one will stop for us.
Eventually, the museum closes and our guide comes out. She´s surprised to see us there still and, even though she´s on her way home, she stays with us for 45 minutes waiting for the bus. When no bus comes, she walks home to call a taxi to take us to the bus station outside of town. A half hour later, she pulls up in a taxi. We get in and go off to the bus station and she walks back home. I feel bad that I thought she was overbearing because it was so nice of her to wait for us and help us out like that. She had no obligation to us and could have just gone home.
The Swiss and I decide to go on another adventure the next day. There´s an excavation site a couple of hours outside of Neuquén where you can work alongside the scientists. We go to the bus station and it´s a confusing hall of ticket windows for various bus companies. We ask how to get there at four different windows, but it seems none of the buses go there. There are two guys at one particular ticket window that take a special interest in us and really help us out. They escort us to the windows of other bus companies to try and get information and they make calls on their personal cell phones to find out how busy the various roads are and if we might be able to get a ride. After two hours (no exaggeration) of trying to get information, we find out that there´s no bus there, but there´s a bus that goes along the road there. We decide to take that bus and get out on the side of the road again and hopefully get a ride the rest of the way.
We get off the bus, again in the middle of nowhere, but this time a car pulls us right away. The driver is so nice. He is of native Indian descent and works at the petroleum refinery down the road from the excavation site. He´s on his way to pick up and deliver lunch to the other Indian works at the various petroleum plants (it´s in the main industry there and the area is full of plants).
He lets us off 15 km away from our destination and asks if we´re hungry. We say yes and he promises to come back with lunch for us after he´s done delivering it to the other works. About a half hour later, he comes back with the aforementioned lunch. It´s blood sausages, bread, oranges and two bottles of Coke. I´m moved by his kindness and generosity. It´s not much food and nothing fancy, but I´m sure it´s expensive for him, especially the bottles of Coke. He drives off, but tell us that at 5pm all the works will be going back to Neuquén in company vans and that, if we´re still stuck here, we can surely get a ride back then.
We wait and wait and wait. The only cars to pass are white petroleum company trucks. The drivers look at us sympathetically, but don´t stop. We figure there is some type of company policy in place and they can´t pick anyone up. It´s pretty boring just sitting there and waiting. We don´t have cards or anything to do and we´ve run out of things to say to each other. I start digging around in the dirt with a stick and find what looks like a piece of wood. I pull it out of the ground and it´s no piece of wood, but a bone! We´re convinced it´s a dinosaur bone and that I´ve made an amazing discovery.
Satisfied, I´m ready to head back to Neuquén, but that´s easier said than done. At 5pm the vans start to head back, but they are company vans and, therefore, don´t stop for us. Now we´re getting a little worried that we´re going to be stuck out here for the night, or longer.
Eventually, a big 18 wheeler pulls out of the refinery and blinks it´s lights at us and waves us on board. He doesn´t work for the company and so isn´t restricted by their policies. Yipee! The driver is a rather taciturn fellow with a long curly ponytail and a black t-shirt with a drawing of a truck on it. We drive mostly in silence, listening to Tina Turner on the radio. I sit back and enjoy my first ride in a big truck and feel relieved to be heading back to civilization.
The next day, my Swiss friend heads north to go on a month long motorcross trip and I head south to check out the lakes district. I feel really glad to have spent a few days with a fluent Spanish speaker. It gave me the chance to see just how friendly, helpful and kind the Argentines really are. Getting to know people is such an invaluable part of traveling and, again, I regret that I speak Spanish like a retarded two year old.
