November 24: Another rest day in Concepción
There a few things I’m keen to see in Concepción, but the top one is Plaza Jurásica: it's life size dinosaur statues! It’s a long walk to get there but I don’t have much else to do today.
One nice thing about Chile is that there is a lot of street art. And it’s usually good. The pictures I'm posting are not a balanced sample because I don't stop to take photos of the bad ones. But I do for the good ones ... and today's trip was extra slow because there was a lot of good stuff on the route today.
From left to right: shaded street. The two-tone wolf was hidden on a sidestreet. Hummingbird was by a cafe. There were several painted buildings. Naming your shop “Matisse” and using a big Van Gogh image is bad manners.
Plaza Jurásica (Jurassic Plaza) has four full-size dinosaurs: a Diplodocus (22m long), a Tyrannosaurus rex, a hanging Pterosaur (with 7m wingspan) and some small hatching dinosaurs that were so badly graffitied I didn't take any pictures. The park is a small triangle, between some busy roads. The ground is sand not grass, it looks like it has a lot of visitors. There are trees, but the ones near the dinosaurs or close to good photo spots look a bit worn. There's also the museum of natural history but it's small and wasn't open.
From left to right: Dinosaurs!
The main other thing I wanted to visit is the "Presencia de América Latina", a 200 square meter mural which depicts the history of Latin America. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presencia_de_Am%C3%A9rica_Latina) Unfortunately my eSim died so I had to navigate there using a saved GPS location. This led me to a nice cafe, which I'd call a half-success, so I stopped there for lunch.
From left to right: Easter Island is part of Chile, but I do not understand why a Moai is here. Colorful pets, but the door is annoyingly tilted. Probably graffiti rather than commercial but it’s so good I’m not sure. This picture was larger but trees and traffic mean this is all I could get. The Enrique Molina Theater was destroyed by a massive earthquake in 1960, reconstruction was underway in 2010 when it was damaged by another earthquake.
Later on I found that the saved location was wrong, the mural was in a building across the street. I had checked all the nearby buildings and none were open so maybe it wasn't actually possible today.
Back on the bike tomorrow. Six last days of riding to Santiago.
