Hola, I'm back!
This post is about my trip to Aurora del Palmar, which is a huge park of palm trees, and we stayed at a kind of ranch there. I traveled with 4 of my friends from the intensive Spanish course. Warning for A LOT of pictures!
Friday 14.8
We took a bus from Buenos Aires early in the morning, and arrived in a tiny town called Ubajay in the afternoon, after about 6h travel. It was raining like crazy and the only person around was a woman in a café by the bus station. We tried to ask her about how to get to Aurora del Palmar, and she showed us a list of remis (kind of like taxi) and their phone numbers. I called one of them and a guy showed up about 5 minutes later. He drove us the 3 km way to the ranch.
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| We slept in this old train wagon. |
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| Such a nice little room (quite cold and damp at night though, probably meant for summer). |
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| The main building and restaurant, where we spent most of Friday (because of the rain) playing cards and drinking wine. |
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| Rainy weather. |
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| We made friends with some local girls who were hanging out in the main building with us, we taught a little bit of English to them and they gave us this ^_^ |
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| The other side: they tried very hard to get our names right (should be Axel, Ella, Vincent, Filippa and Misja). Muchas gracias Vera, Jazmin y More! |
Saturday 15.8
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| We borrowed bikes and took a trip to Ubajay. The town was quite dead but the weather was nice! |
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| Found a tiny supermarket where we got sandwich ingredients and then we had a picnic! |
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| In the afternoon it was time for the thing that everybody had been waiting for: horseback riding!! |
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| Trying out the equipment... |
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| Axel looking like a jeans commercial. |
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| And we're off! The weather was great and it was really nice just riding calmly for an hour, enjoying the view. |
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| Selfie with the horses (and Filippa). |
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| Returning to the ranch, saw some really cute baby sheep! |
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| And later the same day we went on a palm tree safari in a jeep! |
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| Just amazing. |
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| Couldn't take this road because it was flooded, had to go back. |
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| Sunset in the park. |
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| The vehicle. |
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| Group picture yaay! |
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| Cool palm tree panorama (click for bigger version). |
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| Just chilling by the palm trees. Totally casual. |
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| Learning how to use the settings on my camera. That's the Milky Way right there! |
Sunday 16.8
On Sunday we found out that because of the heavy rain during the previous days, the only two excursions offered were the horseback riding and the safari, i.e. the things we had already done. Our package included one more excursion, and the choice was easy.
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| Horseback riding again! |
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| Misja is happy :) |
Monday 17.8
On Monday, our last day, we found that it was once again raining heavily. We decided to go to a nearby town, Colón, to check out their hot water springs spa. That turned out to be much more difficult than excpected. We didn't find a remis driver who would agree to drive us the 60 km there (except for one, but he couldn't take 5 people), so we had to take the bus. One of the workers at the ranch gave us a ride to the bus station, then we took the 1h bus to Colón, only to discover that the (most likely) only way for us to get back to Ubajay in time (for our bus back to BA) was to catch a bus in 15 minutes! Oh well, so we took the bus for 1h again to get back to Ubajay.
At this point we had like 3h until our bus to BA would leave, and we didn't find anything to eat because it was a public holiday and even the station's café was closed. So I called the remis driver from the first day, he turned up and drove us back to Aurora del Palmar, where we had some delicious steaks. Then he returned a bit later and drove us to the station again. We were back in Buenos Aires at around 11 p.m.
The trip was great, I really enjoyed being away from the big city for a bit! Although the weather wasn't on our side the whole time. It was nice to be able to just relax and hang out in good company :)
