Today, after a long night, we woke up to the sound of my alarm at 10:00 a.m. We had a planned tour at 2:00 p.m. on the Limay River, but other than that, we were just gonna walk around the city. Ryan was passed out in bed, and it took him almost 30 minutes to get out of the bed. Luckily we weren't in a rush, but we still wanted to get out of the hotel at a reasonable time. By around 10:45 a.m., we had all dragged ourselves out of the hotel room and downstairs to the lobby where we got some food. We each got a nice stack of pancakes and dug in. After about 30 minutes of eating, we went back to the room to get ready for the day. We had a lot of time to kill before the the rafting tour on the Limay River, so we decided to walk around the city. On our walk, we passed the San Martin Monument. The monument had a statue of a man riding a horse. The statue was on top of a rectangular shaped podium. Running down the side of the podium was water. John suggested walking over to it and checking it out up close. When we walked over, we noticed a local Neuquén citizen look at the monument. Ryan, being Ryan, walked up to him and asked "What's so important about this statue?" The local citizen surprisingly spoke English. He started by telling us that this monument is historical to Neuquén . He also told us that San Martin, the man on the Horse, is important to Argentinean culture. We didn't expect to have a history lesson this afternoon. Mason checked his watch and noticed that it was 12:45 p.m. The taxi was coming to pick us up at the Hotel at 1 p.m. The monument was 20 minutes walking distance from the hotel, so we had to run. All of us were sprinting through the streets of Neuquén . Some of the people walking on the streets started to cheer us on because they thought we were in a race. John ended up stopping to take a break but everyone else kept on going. Mason, Ryan and I all made it back to the hotel at 1 p.m., but John was lagging behind. We had to tell the taxi driver to wait and he wasn't too excited about it. After two minutes, we saw John round the corner and we started packing into the taxi cab. There wasn't much space, but we didn't have to travel that far. We made it to the river at 1:15 p.m. and the taxi dropped us off at the loading area. We met up with our tour guide and he gave us the run down of the whole trip. Once he finished, we all got our wet suits and life-jackets and departed. (Environmental)
We had another group of four people with us on the raft, but it was still hard to row. It was a 9 kilometer trip, but the current would help us a lot on the river. On the trip we traveled past the Patagonia Steppe. The tour guide explained to us that the steppe was an ecological region that covers most of Patagonia. We had been driving on roads that went over the steppe, but we didn't know much about it. The steppe was 730,000 kilometers long. For an easier way for us to understand it, the guide said it was like a huge desert. Also, we got to see a lot of the steppe's topology which consisted of vast plains, hills, stepped plateaus, river valleys and canyons. Also on the trip, we got to learn about flora in the steppe. The vegetation is mostly made up of two kinds of plants, low shrubs with leaves and thorns and grasslands. We were all very tired by now, but the tour guide said only ten minutes until we were stopping to rest. We had been rowing for an hour and a half, so we were all pretty beat. We finally stopped in Mangrullo and all got snacks provided by the tour. We rested for about 30 minutes talking about all the sights we had seen on the way here. The tour guide started telling us that the way back would be a lot more interesting. We would hit rapids and see many types of wildlife. We all loaded back onto the raft ready for more rowing. About five minutes after departing, we ran into the first rapid. Mason was so scared he almost peed his pants. The rapids weren't that bad but one of the people in the other group almost fell off the raft. After the rapids, we ran into some volcanic rock formations. The guide explained that the rocks got their color from the volcano. It looked stunning. The rocks were huge and all over the place. At one point we rafted through a canyon that was created because of
volcanoes. We also saw many animals. We saw a group of deer and one of them had the largest antlers I had ever seen on a deer. Also we saw this animal called a Guanacos. At first, when we saw the animal, Ryan shouted, "LLAMA!" The tour guide explained to us that this was a type of llama and they were really common around these parts of Argentina. We were closing in on the end of our trip, but we still had to pass through one more rapid. The tour guide warned us that this would be rough and that many people have fallen off, but before the trip they taught us what to do if you fell off, so we were prepared. When we hit the rapids, it was crazy. We were dipping and diving everywhere. John was towards the back of the raft and when we hit a big bump he flew off. Ryan tried to reach for his hand, but John was just out of reach. Once we got through the rapid we pulled the boat over and waited for John to float by. When we saw him come out of the rapids, he was soaked. The tour guide pulled him up to the raft and then we continued going. John said being in the rapids was actually "dope." We got back to the dock at 6:30 p.m. and were so excited to be back on solid ground. Ryan screamed, "FINALLY WE MADE IT." The taxi took us back to our hotel and we were all so tired that we just crashed right into bed and started to snooze.
Comments
Post a Comment