A Zoo with a Difference

Despite being in Buenos Aires (or BA as its known to the hip young travellers on the scene) for 2 days, we haven't actually seen much of the city yet.

After deciding to live a little crazily and dip into the "black market" to exchange some US$ for Argentine Pesos with a little lady on the third floor of our hostel, we took a day trip to a zoo about an hour out of the city. 

The trip began with us, and our Israeli roommate, trying to find the underground bus station not far from our hostel. Once we got there we started getting hassled by a local shouting in Spanish at us. Luckily there were some nice Brazilian people who were able to speak Spanish and English so translated his words for us as well as warn us about accepting advice off strangers. We were told there were no buses leaving from the station for another 2 hours. The local man continued to talk Spanish at us and point at maps. Although we finally got rid of him, we still decided to take his advice and go to a nearby park to see if we could get another bus. It turns out he was in fact trying to help us, and we did catch a bus to the zoo.

Lujan zoo was quite a strange place. We were dropped off at the end of a dirt track where there a women was waiting to sell us tickets. Once we got inside, it didn't really seem like a zoo, it felt more like a petting zoo for farm yard animals. There were geese, ducks and dogs everywhere. And then, just around a corner was an enclosure with tigers. We queued up, watching each person step into the confined space with this normally  dangerous animal. And then it was our turn. The tiger was on a bench and we were directed behind it for pictures. We went through the same process with a number of animals, including white tigers, lions, cubs, elephants and a brown bear. It was a pretty surreal experience getting that close to these sort of animals. We were convinced that they must be drugged until we me an American lady who had been going there for 10 years with animal rights people and ensured us it was all legit.

Our evening was spent at the hostel enjoying a communal BBQ. Here we met plenty of people, including a lot of Israelis and two Canadians, and spent the evening eating various meat (not Emily, who had numerous grilled vegetables), eggy potato salad and bread. Emily also managed to consume a bottle of white wine to compliment her veg.