Thunderstorms in Argentina

Saturday, Jan. 15

I was awakened by thunder around 7:00 this morning. By 8:30, it was raining hard. Mark commented that he was glad we didn´t wait until this morning to see the ruins (which we considered doing due to the cooler temperatures in the mornings). We decided to pack and catch a bus to Posadas if there was a break in the rain. In the meantime, the lady who ran the place cooked breakfast for her family and shared it with us. It was chipas (or chipitas?) which was simply just fried dough strips. They were filling, but they provided no real nutrition for either us or her family. It´s something cheap to eat, however, and this is one of the poorest regions of Argentina.

Well, it kept raining most of the morning, but there was a break from about 9:30 until 10:15 that allowed us to get to the bus stop and catch a bus to Posadas at 10:05 without getting wet at all! We hoped to both be able to catch other buses once we arrived there, since we had already determined that the only thing to see there, a museum about the Guaranì Indians, was closed on weekends.

I bought a ticket to continue to Resistencia while Mark ran all over the Posadas station trying to find a line with a seat for Buenos Aires without staying overnight. He had given up and was going to Resistencia with me (in hopes of getting a BA bus from there or at least seeing something interesting while staying overnight for a bus the next day) when he found that the company selling the ticket to Resistencia had had a cancellation for BA and, therefore, had one free seat for him to travel as he had hoped tonight. He bought it.

We had lunch together awaiting my departure--a friend empanada filled with ground beef and cheese and a baked empanada filled with ham. At 1:00, he saw me off for my 5 1/2 hour trip to Resistencia. He was going to be on the Internet and do other things to pass the 7 hours until his night bus departed.

I traveled through Chaca, a province that is so wet it is almost swampy. It had beautiful, dark green, clumpy grasses, and there were lots of water birds standing in the fields. The cows were sometimes almost buried to their knees with the ground being so moist. Mosquitoes were everywhere, including swarming inside the bus. I got several bites during the trip. Finally, after crossing the Paranà River, which is as wide as the Mississippi, I arrived at the bus station on the edge of town.

Because I wanted to be safe, I bought a ticket for the bus to Salta for tomorrow night rather than waiting and taking a chance that all the seats would be sold by the time I return to the station tomorrow. Then I caught the local bus into town. The tourist office at the bus depot was closed, and I had to worry about finding the recommended hotels without a map. (There was no map for this city in my guidebook either.) I got off the bus in the center of town. Fortunately, two women pointed the way to Obligato Street where two places were listed in the guidebook. Both had rooms, but the nicer one had a/c and breakfast. I went for it at $15 U.S.

This is a rather large city, and being here on Saturday night is like going back in time to the early 1950s in the U.S. Downtown was full of families. They were shopping, they were visiting with friends they met on the streets, they were having pastries and ice cream at a well-known cafe on the biggest square in town, etc. It was an exciting evening in this downtown which is about the size that downtown Corpus Christi was in the 1950s. After exploring town and stopping at a cyber cafe, I ate a pizza and returned to the hotel at 10:15.

Walking: 10,827 steps (3822 aerobic steps), 471 calories, 7.35 km (4.4 miles)