Quebrada del Condorito

The sharp-eyed amongst you who have been reading our bird list updates (so probably that rules out everybody…..) will have noticed that we now have Andean Condor on the list.

Yes, we saw some of these majestic creatures when we went to visit Quebrada del Condorito – which is a National Park in Córdoba province.

So let’s cut to the chase – the park was beautiful and we saw some Condors:

So we didn’t get a pic of a big condor, but we did see one – yes honestly – we had binoculars – it was quite far away.

Now I’ve got a minor complaint about the lady from the tourist office who when we asked ‘Is it cold in the park?’ – she said – ‘No, the same as here (Córdoba).’ . But on reaching the park we discovered that it’s at 2000m above sea level (compared to around 500m for Córdoba), so OF COURSE it’s colder. It was about 10 degrees colder – eg. around 4 degrees…. Yes, we should have looked it up ourselves….anyway once walking it was not TOO freezing, even though we didn’t have our extra jackets – which we would have had if the lady had TOLD US THE TRUTH….

But the bad part is that after doing the walk in the park (around 20km total), you have to wait by the side of the road for a bus. IT WAS FREEZING I tell you. After 53 minutes of standing in the cold biting wind and no bus, I began to fear for CC’s sanity.

In the end, the bus never came and we got a lift part of the way with the man from the restaurant nearby – so we were saved from the bitter cold just in the nick of time. But as punishment for our sin of not doing our own research re: the climactic conditions of the park, we had to listen to a very long monologue covering local industry, all the tourists that he had ever met in Argentina, and conspiracy theories regarding Hitler’s death. Not only that, he decided that my name was too hard to pronounce, and so I would be called ‘Pablito’ – do I look like a PABLITO ?!?!?!

Pablito –  ‘the serious, quiet one’… CC explained that it was because I was concentrating on trying to understand Spanish and that actually I wasn’t that serious or quiet really… How could someone called PABLITO be serious?

Anyways, we were grateful for the lift and we returned to the warmth of Córdoba.