St augustine and national parks

from 5 Oct - 6 Oct 06

despite being surrounded by desert since entering Argentina, we had constantly been in oasis type towns where impressive water chanels keep everything green. We were now to head out to the actual desert and a couple of supposedly ´must see´ national parks.

I´m pretty over deserst in general. A bit of time in the Middle East will do that to you. The lack of colour becomes as depressing as living in London during winter. (Also devoid of colour). But hey the National Partks were actualy pretty cool. Our hostel in St Augustine was simple, but at $10NZ for us both who were we to complain. We ended up doing a ´tour´ina small car with an Ozzy couple and a slighly mad driver. He must have been in his seventies and kept cracking jokes.. in Spanish which Sara then had to interpret. He got a bit upset when he stated with riddles, and i knew the first one straight away.)The oldie about a CHICKEN laying an egg on a border, and which country the egg belongs to)

Tampallaya reminded me of Petra in Jordan, but without the amazing carvings. The massive canyon walls were cool, and some of the ancient petroglyphs were pretty amusing. Especily the one depicting a hunter, and his MASSIVE middle leg.. (see photo on left!)

Ischigualasto (the moon valley) was a bit of a let down ,except for the amazing colours in the rock faces. Reds, green and even brown.

The old boy tried to pull a fast one at the end of the day. He was to drop us at a bus stop (a cafe in the middle of no where) where we would wait from 6 till the 9.30pm bus. At 5pm he mentioned another bus would be at the stop at 5.30. To catch it we would have to miss the museum and rush there. We smelled a rat, but went along with it. Sure enough we had ¨just missed¨the bus and would have to wait till 9.30. We got the last laugh though, cos in his haste to get away he forgot to collect the money for the park, saving us a grand $13NZ each. We figured the best way to utilise these savings was to pass the time drinking beer. And at $1.50NZ for a one litre bottle we didnt even come close to spending it all.

Beer it would seem makes me a bit more multi lingual though. I generaly find languages a bit difficult, always feeling that I make them sound bloody awful (English included), but with a few beers in me I had a good ol yarn to the bus driver when he arrived. I think i told him that i was also a bus driver, but in honesty the details are a bit blurry..

once on board i passed out, so sleeping on a bus was uncharacteristicly easy.

It was a relatively short sleep(coma) though cos we got to La Rioja at midnight. Deciding to continue to Tucuman asap we bought tickets for the next night bus (at 3am). With 3 hours to kill we wandered into the town centre.

And what did we find...! A full on death metal gig in the town square! Well not that full on, just a few moshing teens really. But the music was bloody loud and the whole thing sent me back about 16 years... for better or worse.

At 3 we jumped on our flashest bus yet, like business class on a plane no less, and again crashed hard