Rio Caballos

Yesterday, I decided to go for a hike. I went to the tourist office in town and asked where I should go. They weren´t particularly helpful. They gave me a map of the surrounding communities and said that they were all different. I went to the bus station and chose to go to Rio Caballos mostly because there was a bus leaving soon that went there and it appeared to be next to a lake. On the nearly empty bus a woman sat down in the seat next to mine. She smelled strongly of camphor or musty silk that has been sitting in the closet too long. It made me feel a bit light headed for the rest of the day. The town is a very attractive town to walk in and I sat on the side walk drinking orange juice and watching the world go by. The place to hike was about 5 kms out of town at a dammed off lake. I took a local bus to the dam (a fairly hair raising experience) and walked around the lake for a while. Supposedly, you could hike to a waterful somewhere but I never found the right trail. The country there was nice but not spectacular and while I had a nice afternoon I would not insist that anyone else follow my footsteps there. I walked back to the town from the lake and took the bus home. I went to bed as soon as I got to the hostel and probably would have stayed there until morning if I hadn´t had to do laundry and book my bus ticket. When I returned to my room I met my new roomates some teachers from Rio Negro (argentina) who were in town for a conference. They insisted that I join them for dinner and I did. The whole affair was in Spanish and I felt that I did pretty well. I can now easily hold messy conversations about many things in Spanish. I think I may know more vocabulary in French and Swedish but, for me, those are languages of individual words. Spanish is becoming a language of sentences.

This evening I will take the bus from Cordoba to Paso de Los Libres (on the Uruguayan, Argentinian, Brazilian border) and from there take another bus to Mercedes.