Dinosaurs and Nestor Kirchner

Plaza Mayor Buenos Aires - we want our Islands back

We planned to have a couple of relaxing days in Buenos Aires before heading south. On the second day we had a look around the city and went to the giant Mausuleum in the city centre, full of over the top buildings housing family coffins. The most interesting was that of Eva Peron, national treasure and subject of Andrew Lloyd Webbers and Tim Rices attention writing the play Evita about her (don´t cry for me Argentina etc).  We heard that on the third day there was going to be a census count so nothing would be open so decided to stay an extra day.

On that day we woke up to find Nestor Kirchner had also died aged 60 - the countries previous prime 

Don´t cry for me Argentina....Eva Peron Grave

minister and also husband of current prime minister Christina Kirchner, so 3 days of mourning were also declared. That day  was really bizarre, the city was completely dead. We went into the city centre and found one cafe open in the whole city. Mcdonalds and Burger king were even closed! Consequently we had no lunch, and had to wait until 8pm when all the restaurants reopened.

On the day we were due to get the night bus south to Neuquen, we went into the plaza to see the huge gathering of Argentines that were waving flags and lining up to view the body of Kirchner. A woman approached us asking if we were German, when i said i was English she poked my chest and launched into some tirade about the Falklands, i couldn´t make out exactly what she was saying but it wasn´t friendly!! There was a falklands 

Fierce creatures (and Emma!)

demonstration also going on in the plaza nearby (amazing how any large gathering attracts nationalists with  flags, especialy when the nation is feeling a bit wounded....), and Christina Kirchner had recently been twittering away about the British being colonialists because we are practising Navel maneouvers in the Southern Atlantic, so i don´t think that helped the anti British mood any.......

The bus to Neuquen took 16 hours and wasn´t wonderful but fairly comfortable. Neuquen was another city like Santa Cruz a couple of weeks previously, it was a large functional city with no tourist facilities. The next day we took the bus to a village called El Chocon to visit the dinosaur museum and footprints. The museum was easy to find, and had some very impressive skeletons in it including a huge T-rex type creature. We went to a cafe and asked 

Dinosaur Footprints

where the footprints were, and it seemed they were some distance but we set off anyway to find them.


Dinosaur Footprints in the rock



Then the girl in the cafe came out and asked if we wanted a lift there!  We ended up on an ATV being driven around for a couple of great hours by the 12 year old son of one of the workers there. It was great, i loved the rules stuck on the ATV. No under 16´s. No passengers. Don´t go on roads. We managed them all.



He took us to see 2 sets of footprints that were really clear, set in stone on the edge of a beautiful artificial lake which were really amazing, over 100million years old and there was quite a few of them. We would have had no chance of finding them ourselves, there was  no signposts and they were miles away.

So it turned out to be a great day, however no thanks to the argentinian tourism industry.......!