One Apple A Day #166
Esquel, January 5th, 2017
The station of Esquel is a little more modern than the one in El Maitén. Here the feeling is more of a movie from the seventies but with WiFi.
We wait for the train eating some empanadas and watching a group of kids using the parking for their small car-washing business. Crichetta would need a cleaning after our entertaining excursion on the gravel, but we love it like this, dirty and wild.
The museum of the station doesn’t offer much, but it’s a good place to kill the last 30 minutes before our ride, and we meet the lady who will be our guide in the train. When she asks if what language she should use, we have no doubts; it has to be Spanish!
When the train arrives, it makes quite an entrance with all the smoking, the clunking and the high-pitching bell.
The train is indeed remarkable. The black and red locomotive is massive, and the wooden coaches suddenly take us back a century in the past. We soon discover the reason for this feeling; the locomotive was built in Germany in 1922 while the Belgian made coaches date back to 1926.
The trip is short, just 37 kilometres but it takes a good 50 minutes because the train moves slowly across the Pampa. And this is great because it gives us the time to contemplate the breath-taking scenario; the never-ending green and yellow plateau, the mountains at the horizon, the lazy cows grazing while the Gauchos (the cowboys) are running around on their horses.
We stop in a small village, one of the last reminders of the indigenous communities of this part of the world. We discover that when the European arrived, only a few centuries ago, they completely wiped out the existing inhabitants. Some of them are fighting for their right just to exist. We buy something to support their cause, and we head back to Esquel.
We can still feel in our bones and muscles the pleasure of the experience in the tent the night before. We opt for a comfortable room in a small hotel before searching a restaurant. We find a cosy place where we have some meat (it looks like in this part of the world, vegetables are only for the cows) and some red wine. Enough to be sure to fall asleep immediately. We must recover from the night before, and tomorrow we want to cover a long distance.