Necochea Hotels
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Brief stay in this little burg.
Entry 3 of 9 | show all | print this entry |
I´m kind of mad again at the Army doctor who performed my rhinoplasty, meant to correct a deviated septum. For one.... brief..... shining moment before they packed my nasal cavity with yards of gauze (there´s a story about its removal that I´ll save until asked) I could breathe. Really breathe! Out of both sides of my nose....SIMULTANEOUSLY!! I remember vividly being asked, while in this dreamy, floaty state to breathe in through my nose and report my findings. I breathed in and responded ´´oooh.....thassssss wunnnerrrfullll´´. And then fade to black. Within 3 weeks of the surgery it was obvious that where I had always had to sleep on my left side so as to position my head to keep the left sinus open, now I would have to sleep on my right side to accomplish the same deed. I bring this up now because while I was on a bus to Necochea where the seats reclined nicely I was not able to do the correct side gymnastic sleeping trick due to the proximity and position (not to mention disposition) of the young lady next to me. So sleep didn´t seem likely until exhaustion set in. After a while it seemed less about the circumstances that I couldn´t sleep and more about the fact I just didn´t seem tired. But I should have been. I went to the cemetery in Recoleta for 2 or 3 hours to look around and take pictures and got a nice sunburn. Shannon, am I correct in assessing that some of the first pictures of yours that I ever saw were taken there? Or am I just making that up?
I had planned on leaving that day for Necochea so I got a reasonably early start being completely unaware as to when the possible departures were. Sylvana at the hostel....um ...she .............uh where was I......? Oh yeah, Sylvana! She helped me with some info about the bus schedule and I loaded up the mule (me) and lit out. I´ve been using that large messenger bag I have as a sort of day-pack but it just wasn´t suitable. It sort of twisted me up after a couple of hours of hefting it around. So after finding the bus station, figuring out which bus to take, buying the ticket and gathering my thoughts I decided to buy a little backpack. Loaded it up and put the bigger bags in a locker and went looking for new parts of town and the cemetery. By the way don´t ever let anyone help you put bags in a locker or handle the token/coin and key part of the operation. There are a couple of pretty deft scams that will leave you bag-less. Don´t worry. That didn´t happen to me. It´s just worth mentioning for future reference. My departure was at 23:30 (Amy, tell everyone what time that is) so I had 11 hours to kill. So I made the cemetery my first priority. Found some things to shoot on the way but was at the cemetery within about 30 minutes. Before this trip I had never heard of a ´´tout´´. Sure, I knew the word and A meaning of it. I had just never considered that it was also a noun. In retrospect I´ve run into them before in and around train stations. But here, there are folks at every corner, on every pedestrian mall and at every taxi stand pushing their particular thing. I didn´t ever expect to have that kind of pressure going into a cemetery. Here I encountered this petite woman roughly my own age a little more made up than any I had seen so far in BA unless they were performing, and she was very animated speaking in this exaggerated English accent, when she discerned that was my tongue, trying to sell a guide to the grave sites. Turns out, to the best of my knowledge, that the proceeds went to the cemetery and even if they didn´t it WAS helpful and it was only $4.
Now where was I? Well I finally wandered back to the bus terminal and of course had to wait. It´s funny that they put the platform number on the ticket because the bus never, ever comes to that slot. Keeps you on your toes, it does! Finally arrived and we loaded up. Fast forward through to the end of the ride, because the middle was full of sleep and unremarkable non-events, and we arrived maybe 7 a.m. in what I thought was Necochea. It was. I say thought it was because I was almost never sure. After that I´d work pretty hard to get some sort of confirmation as to the town we were entering. In the U.S. water towers work that way in the rural areas and pretty decent signage too. Here it is a lot less...well, specific. Got off the bus and dragged my self and stuff into the Cafeteria, which here refers to some place to get coffee, not a buffet. Though those are present as well. Had what was becoming my drink of choice here, Cafe con crema. It´s a little sweet from the rather dense whipped cream which makes the coffee a little more palatable because it just isn´t as good as Seattle. On top of that, even if I had the vocabulary to describe an iced Americano I just don´t see it working. So, the coffee helped clear the cobwebs from my brain and I found a taxi to take me to the hotel Neptuno from my Lonely Planet guide. First lesson of this leg for me was book in advance. Hotel Neptuno was full. No problem something will turn up. I went to the Information Center on the beach which was just opening up and got some help from Sonia in our combined version of Spanglish. Her English much better than my Spanish of course. Finally found one that charged roughly two and a half times what I was hoping for and lugged my stuff 5 or 6 blocks to go look at the room.. I was offended. Since then my expectations have been modified but when I saw this room for the price they wanted I almost got huffy. It was barely long enough for a bed that is already too short form me to stretch out on in the first place. A path next to the bed maybe a foot and a half wide leading to a bathroom that was like a combined toilet shower like you´d find in a sailboat. In a sailboat I´d think it was novel. And all this after walking through the hotel and out the back past piles of junk and a tiny uncut grassy area to what looked like a storage shed. I was not a little disappointed. No me gusta!!! Is what I thought. No, is what I said without the exclamation marks. I skulked back to the Information office and waited for Sonia again, because we were so intimately acquainted by now. She eventually found something in the town center which is roughly where the Bus station is. It didn´t look like much else would turn up so I took a city bus to the center and found this hotel. Communication was as much a problem as ever with the new hotelier but I had practiced how to say may I see the room? He took the key and led me through a maze of stairs and turns and steps up and steps down and I started thinking to myself ´´If he leads me out the back door I´m gonna hit him´´. Fortunately we were never faced with that circumstance. Again a dinky room (and it wouldn´t be my last) but the shower was just outside the room. It also had the characteristics of the head and shower combo found on smaller boats but a skosh more room and it didn´t look like they sometimes stored the snow tires there. Got settled and set out to do something. Took the camera and headed for the river that splits the little town or maybe it´s two towns I don´t remember now. I took a couple of pictures but they just started to seem like snapshots and while a few are necessarily just to document things if I can´t make photos with some sort of artistic component then I don´t like doing it. That to say, I took maybe 5 photos and then it was time to do something else. I got to know the dozen or so square blocks pretty quickly and focused on finding interesting places to eat and somewhere to get my photo uploading problem figured out. Here are the highlights- a parilla called El Libertador was a fine little place where I had two meals. Not all at once. Seemed like lots of locals inside and it worked out very well. Another place where I did all my phone and computer use was a cozy little coffee, lunch type of place with lots of wood and several regulars I saw in and out often. My last afternoon and evening there they let me leave my big bag while I tried not to die of boredom by doing some more exploring. Mochila was the word of the day. Backpack. I don´t know how I hadn´t absorbed that one yet but the woman behind the bar taught me that one. It has come in handy since. At one point while wandering around town this little boy came up to me and asked if he could have a dollar. I never know what is going on when something like that happens so I took my time and tried to be sure I understood. At first it sounded like he wanted to take me someplace where I could exchange money. I told him I didn´t need any. So he just kind of followed me around for a while and when he talked again about Pesos a gathered a little different intent. Now it seemed he wanted to give me three Pesos for a dollar. Well that´s a no brainer. That can´t be a problem. Even thought there is a counterfeit bill problem in Argentina that we are frequently warned about, they are not counterfeiting 2 Peso bills ore 1 Peso coins. And then something occurred to me that he might be able to help me with. I hadn´t bought a single postcard this whole trip and the cards I´d found seemed really expensive. So I asked him to help me find some postcards. He found a place where I found some local cards that were just so so. But he had worked hard to find them. I bought four and gave him a Peso for his trouble. He was a cute kid and I asked his name but couldn´t exactly understand. So I had him write it down on the bag of postcards. So now I have his autograph.
Departure time rolled around so I got myself to the bus station and had a good wait. This one left a little less than an hour behind schedule. Now it was on to Puerto Madryn. And I had arranged, or so I thought, possibilities in a couple of different hostels while in Necochea. I was beginning to figure out a rhythm. This bus had originated somewhere else and I was a bit confused that someone was in my seat. That´s when I also realized that the seat number assigned didn´t carry much meaning similar to the bay from which the bus was ´supposed´ to depart. Someone was in my seat and had been for this previous leg of their trip. I didn´t want to be a jerk and so didn´t press it. I pretty sure I could have taken her though. She didn´t look that tough. Had to squeeze past a put-out young woman (referred to earlier) to take a window seat which is the crux of the earlier problem with sleeping position. It was a bit tight. Even so, I managed to get some rest.
That´s enough for now, people need the computer and someone just turned on the TV and The Hulk is on. The one with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. I wonder what the Hulk will say in Spanish.
Ciao.
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