Cuevas de las Manos

Tuesday, Mar 25 – Day 99

Another early bus ride. We leave at 9:00 am for ciudad Perito Moreno (not to be confused with the glacier of the same name that I saw earlier). Well, I guess 9:00 is not that early, but it will take 13 hours to get there. So there’s not going to be much to write about today. On all of these Patagonian bus routes, the roads are so bad that the bus companies won’t use the nice busses with the 1st class, or “cama” seats. They get too beat up. So these are all old busses with standard, four-across seating.

I guess the one cool part is that I’ll be travelling almost the entire Route 40, which some claim is the route Che Guevara travelled on his Motorcycle Diaries trip. The Argentines think of is as their version of our Route 66. My own investigation shows that he actually went north to Peru, but hey, it’s their story.

We got to Perito Moreno at about 11:00 pm, and arranged a van to go to the Cuevas de las Manos in the morning. We leave at 7:00 am, and it’s going to take 3 ½ hours to get there. Las Cuevas are a set of caves that were first discovered in the 1870’s. There are hand paintings there from indigenous tribes that date back some 8,000 years. So this will be a nice little diversion, and it breaks up the travel to Bariloche, which is another 16 hours north of Perito Moreno.

Wednesday, Mar 26 – Day 100

Up at 6:00 am, and out the door at 7:00, Cuevas de las Manos is over 3 hours away on another rocky road. On the way, we have to slow down or stop several times for herds of wild guanacos and emus that are wandering about. After all the driving through this empty space, we finally come upon a valley that looks like the only habitable space for hundreds and hundreds of kilometers. Here, the indigenous tribes killed the occasional guanacos (a relative of the llama), rheas, and felines and lived off the land. The “caves” are really more like the side of a cliff with an overhang, but none the less, the tribes lived here and painted these pictures of their hands in some type of ritual. The paintings are believed to have been done in three distinct periods, the oldest being 8,000 to 9,000 years old. The caves were first documented in the 1870’s, but not photographed or catalogued until the 1940’s.

It was a long way to go to see these things, but it was pretty cool and worth the effort. After our 3 hour return, we went right to the bus station to see about catching the 5:00 bus to Bariloche. We got there 5 minutes before the bus left, then found out that we didn’t have enough Argentine pesos to pay for the seats. The bus company didn’t take credit cards or Chilean pesos, and of course there is no ATM, but luckily, I had my stash of US dollars. They were happy to accepted the greenbacks, but not at a very favorable exchange rate. Anyway, we made the bus and now have 16 hours to kill.