Travel has three distinct phases. The nervous excitement surrounding the departure, the relaxed middle part when you’re eating, watching a movie, or enjoying the passing scenery, and the tense build-up to the arrival when all you want to do is get off the damn bus. And if you’re arriving into an unfamiliar city, you then have the added worry of trying to figure out where to go. Once again first class travelers have nothing to worry about because a smiling driver holding up a sign bearing your name will be waiting to chauffer you to some swanky hotel. But I ask you, where’s the fun in that? Christi and I arrive in La Rioja on time at 7.30 am. And a quieter backwater you’d be hard pressed to find; there’s no one around and nothing is open. I’m guessing aliens visited during the night and abducted the whole town, except perhaps for the owner of our hotel, Pensione 9 de Julio, but even he seems a little dazed and confused.
What with alien abductions and afternoon siestas there’s only limited window of opportunity in which to accomplish anything in La Rioja and we’re about to give up and move on when we stumble across a travel agency willing to take us to the nearby parks of Talampaya and Ischigualasto tomorrow. I say nearby, but the parks are actually 135 miles away – and La Rioja is the closest town of any size. The travel agent does not speak English so it’s a complicated exchange with lots of hand gestures and some embarrassing attempts to speak Spanish on our part. Still the office is plastered with seductive images of the parks, which makes me even more determined to visit them.
When we finally surface from the travel agents (after concluding some sort of deal that involved me handing over lots of money), La Rioja is finally moving, albeit very slowly (zombie-like?). We eat a rather tasty brunch overlooking the central plaza, before retiring to an internet café. I also spend oodles of cash two first-class tickets (the luxury seats recline 180o) on an Andesmar bus between Mendoza and Bariloche (an 18-hour journey). It was all that damn talk of first class travel that made me do it. For once Christi and I join in the afternoon siesta, but we’re still the only people in the restaurant when we eat dinner at 8 pm. La Rioja finally comes to life when we go to bed at 11pm (now it feels like we’re in some vampire flick).
Blog post by Roderick Phillips, author of Weary Heart – a gut-wrenching, heart-wrenching, laugh-wrenching tale
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