Following the dinosaurs

After last night’s cocktails we all slept incredibly well and woke up feeling good. The breakfast was fairly ordinary so we decided to go out and find some of the beautiful cake we kept seeing in cafes. However as soon as we came to a cross road we spotted an enormous market. It was the local market held every Saturday where people buy their weekly supplies. There were masses of beautiful looking veggies, fresh chicken and eggs, cheese and other food supplies. There were also clothes, CDs and DVDs and items of all description.

But the thing that most captivated us was the number of yummy things to eat. We bought and ate:

• A slice of lemon meringue pie;
• A slice of jam pie (a little like lintzertorte);
• A slice of an orange cake, we think was made with something like polenta;
• Chicken empanadas – absolutely by far and away the best we have eaten;
• Hot chips – freshly made with local potatoes, quite different;
• Dulce de Leche filled donuts
• Bananas, apples and mandarins

This feast cost us a total 16 pesos, about $5 Australian!

It was really cold though, maybe 5 degrees with a significant wind chill factor so we gave our thermals their first real workout.

We wandered until 12.30 when it was time to meet Jorge and head off on the next leg of our dinosaur journey. Today we went out first to Project Dinosaur, the dig that Anna had first found out about. It is an ongoing dig, which was started in about 2000 when paleontologists from the local uni found a sauropod’s fossilized remains. Since then 3 very complete skeletons and many other sections of dinosaur remains have been found.

To get there we drove through beautiful countryside. It is desert like, covered with low scrub. Near town huge wind breaks of poplars have planted to protect the apple trees. Apples are a major industry here, but the real employer and job is oil. There are pumping stations and refineries everywhere and they are the major employers. It isn’t really surprising then given the oil deposits that it is a major site for finding dinosaur fossils.

Project Dinosaur is great. It is a working dig but the tour has been set up to explain the fossils, how they are created and the process for retrieving them. It is really interesting. One of the best things was a whole lot of fossilized tree. The minerals had made them go smooth and lovely to touch (yup, you can just touch the fossils here) and several had been fossilized with copper which had then oxidized The result was that they looked almost like they had been spray painted. We also got to hold a fossilized dinosaur egg which was really cool, like a pimply textured bowling ball.

From there we continued around the lake it is situated on. Another man made lake (this one to control flooding as well as for power), it looked stunning with its aquamarine blue water against the red-orange earth. Flocks of goats wander the landscape and occasionally you see horses freely grazing. Only issue was that Amy and I kept falling asleep missing the scenery!

We went to another museum (sorry, I can't remember the name) where they have a replica of the largest dinosaur found. It is truly huge, a single leg bone is longer than me, it is hard to believe that such a thing could have walked the earth, let alone that there could have been herds of them! They have a full scale model along with the various bones they have discovered.

From there, Jorge took us back into Neuquen. He had managed to fit our packs and other accumulated belongings into his golf so took us straight to the bus station. He was just lovely. The whole trip he was incredibly informative about the dinosaurs but also about the area, what things were (like the little shrines which line the roads in tribute to the dead) and even helping us with our Spanish pronunciation. We really liked him and appreciated the time he took with us.

We are now on the bus to Mendoza. It is an overnight bus ride but we have booked cama seats. This means that not only do they feed us, we have seats that recline back till they are nearly flat! Hopefully it will make for a comfortable trip (although of course the seats are a little short for me) and we will get plenty of sleep tonight.

Neuquen has been fantastic, now it is on to Mendoza.