Travel diaries

I arrive in Buenos Aires via the overnight bus at 9:30am, ditch my backpack in a locker and jump on a 10am bus to La Plata, an hour and a half southeast.  I’m going there to visit the Museo de Ciencias Naturales (I think you can figure out the translation for yourself). I have a thing for old fashioned museums- or actually any musty smelling, institutional place with old wooden cabinets and taxidermied animals- and large sections of this museum are supposed to be original from 1888.

When I get there, I’m greeting by a pair of stone saber toothed tigers on the museum steps, a cute alternative to the classic lion motif. I love the way the foyer is decorated and start taking pictures and mental notes, in case I ever become rich and have a house with a rotunda entrance. There are large murals with painted animal scenes and bronze animal heads on wooden plinths all around. It has kind of a creepy, ritualistic feel to it, but that only adds to the allure for me.

The exhibits near the entrance have been remodeled and have a boring, clinical vibe. As I move through the museum though, it’s like moving back through time. The wooden cabinets and the old tile flooring start to appear, then the pinned and mounted insects. I finally get to the room with the stuffed animals and am so excited that I want to scream. The walls are lined, floor to ceiling, with wooden cabinets that are filled with taxidermy, as are the wooden display cases on the floor. They’ve got an amazing collection of birds and animals- some of the things there I never even knew existed! My favorite is probably the cat cabinet and I take a picture to show my cat when I get back home.

I go back to Buenos Aires for the night and eat an amazing southeast Asian dinner. The food in Argentina is no good and I’ve been dying to get to BA so I could eat something other than white bread and cheese.

The next day, I get on a boat to Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay. It’s a cute, but kind of boring, seaside town with a historic district. It’s pretty and nice to walk around the cobblestone streets and sit by the water, but it’s very touristy and seems to be a destination for mainly couples and mature travelers. An afternoon would have been sufficient, but I had to make my reservations in advance and so I’ve got a day and a half.

My big excitement in Colonia is that I’m staying at a bed and breakfast and have my own private room and bathroom- no more hostel dormatories or sleeping in my tent. I go back to my room at 6:30pm to lie down for a couple of hours and don’t wake up until close to 4:30 the next morning. I go back to sleep until 9:30 and still have a hard time getting out of bed. I realize then how exhausting the traveling has been and how hard it’s been on my body.

That afternoon is grey and rainy. I ditch the touristy area and take a local bus 5 km outside of town to the Real de San Carlos. It’s a ghost town resort that they built in the the 1940’s and only used for a couple of years. I want to visit the remaining buildings which are all abandoned and crumbling grandeur. The first thing I see is a really cool bullfighting ring. It’s surrounded by a small fence topped with barbed wire, but I spy a hole and slip in. I go into the center of the ring and feel like I’m standing in the middle of the Coliseum. A dog emerges from beneath the stands and starts running towards me. I’m afraid that he’s going to bite my leg off and panic until I look closer and see that his tongue is goofily hanging out of his mouth. We play for a moment and then he runs off to who knows where. I walk around beneath the stands among the rusted out metal supports and crumbling bricks.

Off in the distance, I see the remains of the racetrack and head over there. The track itself is overgrown now and I find it funny that there’s a horse grazing around in the center. I sit up in the yellow and green bleachers and enjoy being the only person around. Later in the night, I’m going back to Buenos Aires and there’ll be no more of that.