Monte Hermosa, Argentina

Jan 12, 2005

This is the sort of place that spoils you. I´m two blocks from an incredibly long beach, in a clean room that set me back $20, just had a hamburger for $1.33, and walking past the place with Paella for $3, in a big pan they cook right next to the window, I asked myself when I would be hungry again. There is a long strip of stores closed to traffic that leads down to the beach, with street performers and throngs of vacationing Argentinians.

There are women who should not wear thongs. Most of them are here.

There have been a lot of jokes made about Argentina and Germans, and there are a lot of German placenames here, but it was still somewhat disconcerting when I returned to my hotel from the beach and the owner started speaking to me in fluent German.

I got a new tire put on and decided to put in early for a change instead of riding until ten and hoping to find something, figuring my luck was due to change. So I turned in here at 4, and took nice long walk on the beach. The water is warm but brown, because of the sand, I´m told.
When the argentinians are not kicking a soccer ball, they play a game like bocce on the beach, tossing wooden discs instead of rolling balls.

You can buy a beachfront condo here for between 15,000 and 30,000 US.

Bahia Blanca, Argentina

Jan 11, 2005

There are times when the sight of a McDonalds is oddly comforting. There is one here, but of course they have managed to find a way to make things move slowly.

Yesterday I wrangled permission from the local government to film Sea Lions at the largest sea lion reserve in Patagonia. There are about 3,500 of them there right now, having babies and in general making noise. Finally I found something that smells worse than that Chilean´s breath.

I was assigned a member of the park service to take me down to the part of the reserve that is off limits to the public, and things were going pretty well until he figured out that all I wanted to film was the sea lions running away from me. So I've got a lot of good shots of sea lions scrambling down rocks and over one another to get to the ocean.

There are also flocks of parrots clinging to the telephone poles and screaming so loud I can hear them, even wearing my helmet and riding at about 50 miles an hour. I tried to film them and got a lot of shots of them flying away as I approached, so I had to film one that had a misadventure with a truck to get a general idea of what they look like.

Bahia Blanca is a big city, with a high rise downtown, and a lot of blonde people and Italian-Argentinian businesses and hospitals. I got in at about 10, which is dark now, unlike further south, so I really haven´t had a good look at the city. I did take a wrong turn and
quickly found out there are places in Argentina that look like Tijuana. One nice thing about the country is that you can drive at night without worrying about some idiot grazing his herd of cows on the highway.

And everything is still cheap.