Argentina

November 6-29, 2009

November 23: Lago los Barreales and Proyecto Dino

When researching things to do with kids in Argentina, one of the main ideas that we found on the internet was to go dinosaur hunting. In particular, the "Dino Project" - a dig just northwest of Neuquén along Lago Los Barreales: http://www.proyectodino.com.ar/. The project, considered a "complete ecosystem of the Mesozoic era:, is overseen by the University of Comahue. You can even sign up ahead to participate with the excavation onsite although this is restricted to adults only.

So we headed out this morning, leaving the Andes and slowly making our way back into the pampas. We decided to save ourselves a lot of driving and see the dino site on the way to Neuquen city and to cross our fingers that getting accomodations in the evening would not be too difficult. The highlights of the drive were an amazing birding opportunity along the road and a very strange police checkpoint encounter.

At the dino site we were the only visitors and seeing all the signs that said visitation was by guided tour only, we started to wonder if today was going to be a complete bust. We rang the doorbell and a voice instructed us to wait while someone came. It turns out that the dino season is just about finished with the rising waters of Lago Los Barreales starting to wash out the dig site. There were no more guides at the site but the scientist working at the site was happy to give us a tour. And being a scientist, he actually spoke English! Woohoo! He gave us a wonderful tour of both the dig site and the lab/museum.

After the tour we had a quick late lunch in the parking lot and then headed down to the lakeshore for a little walk and to let the kids play a bit. We didn`t find any dinosaur fossils ourselves and finally we decided it was time to move on since we still had the unpleasant task of finding accomodations ahead of us.

In Neuquen, the capital city of Neuquen province we found the tourist information place but they weren`t willing to call around for us and driving around the city trying to look for hotels and asking for availability seemed a little daunting. So we decided to head on to the smaller city of General Roca and try our luck there. Got a couple of addresses from the local tourist information and we quickly picked a place that seemed relatively decent. Then we drove into center town to find a geocache and some dinner. Both attempts were less than successful. We never did find the cache and we walked the streets of General de Roca til we thought our feet would drop off before finding a restaurant to have dinner at and even then, the food was pretty terrible. At this point we were pretty happy that we were heading back to Christine`s place the next day!

the photos: