Sorry I don't have any photos and have no idea when I will get any but what the hell. I had to put together a dove hunt for a friend’s bday (present from his wife) he and I have always wanted to go dove hunting in Argentina so she sent him. Long story short, I won a 3 day hunt so the outfitter was easy to pick! LOL

So my friend, my uncle and I went to entre rios province to shoot birds. We hunted the eared dove, they have 20 - 30 million of these things and they destroy up to 40 percent of the crops in this area.

End result was I shot 1809 birds, the other guys got over 2k each. My total does not include all of the parrots I shot. They love for you to shoot parrots, they get very excited when you do this.

To keep this short, the hunting was awesome, the food was awesome, the wine, beer etc. Fantastic trip and I will go again someday. The country is amazingly clean. No litter on the roads etc.

My friend and I then ended up in Buenos Aires which is a pretty neat city to visit. We say a protest while we were there . Complete with masked folks with sticks and a fo dog. No riot though which is nice as I did not want to get killed for my gringo imperialism.

We had no plan for B.A. so we winged it, spent one night in a dodgy hotel before moving to a nice place. We wrangled and invite to the largest cattle sale in the world which was fun to see. We also fucked around in a sure 'nuff no tourist neighborhood. Locals were cool as shit.

I shot 53%, my uncle 58% and my friend 63%.

Bad shit? They have a 35% flat income tax, 21% sales tax, and fuel can be hard to get. I also paid $5 for an orange juice.

tl/dr Argentina is fucking awesome and I don't take enough photos.


Oh and I managed to hit my bird boy square in the chest with a dead dove.

US Outfitter

http://powwowcreekoutfitters.com/


Our in country host.

http://argentinabestdovehunt.com/

We really roughed it at the resort hotel.

See if this works.

Mi Tio = 58%
LUIS
Shells Birds
25 279
20 316
25 368
29 400
20 354
20 299

My friend = 63%
GRILLO
Shells Birds
20 278
20 347
22 368
21 310
20 318
26 420
129 2041

Me = 53%
CARLOS
Shells Birds
23 267
20 259
24 369
23 280
20 331
20 303
130 1809

Shells = boxes This is broken down by hunt with the total at the end. For example I shot 23 boxes of shells for 267 birds the first afternoon. 20 Boxes for 259 birds the next morning and so on.

PS

From pickup to drop off at the airport things went extremely well. Pablo, our PH, went above and beyond in helping us find stuff to do the remainder of the trip.

Was supposed to get them Saturday but his boy was puking so I did not visit.

You had my number. You could have called or emailed. I know Entre Rios like my own neighborhood. I know places in Victoria and Rosario where you can have a really, really good time. I could have given you neighborhoods and hotels to stay at in BsAs. I know people there.

I'm glad you did not go to Cordoba.

I too turned a corner with my wife and walked into a protest. I think they do a lot of that there.

Sorry to hear about such poor shooting, though. And not nearly enough of it....

We rented guns, we paid $50/day for the two guns we used. You have to buy your shells they, you cannot bring them from what I was told. We used the Evo pad/shirt combo that was recommended to us and they worked great.

We ended up staying several days in Recolleta, it was well worth it. The car ride was interesting. LOL

As my uncle said "when everyone drives crazy it is ok". One of the best parts was our exiting the highway only to get right back on to avoid the local police who were looking for a bribe, I had my doubts when he said they were to lazy to chase us but he was right.

There was an unofficial strike of the PFA when I was there last year, and our departure on March 8th coincided with the winding down of an end of summer long holiday weekend. Instead of sending us back to BsAs on the drunk bus, the outfitter broke us up into two unassuming personally owned vehicles that blended in much better.

There were roadblocks of burning tires and railroad ties outside of Victoria and Rosario on the highway, "staffed" by the PFA. There was no way out of it...three 6' plus gringos in the car...they knew what we were doing. We paid $250 US to get through the first one (we had over $100K in shotguns in the car...paying it was a no brainer), and then got off the highway taking the back roads through small towns the whole way. Seeing the countryside that way was better. We stopped for a mid day meal in a small town the middle of nowhere and some of the pussy I saw walking around that place would have turned TRG straight. It almost would have been worth living in abject poverty....almost.

When we got back to the airport, my partner 'lost' his gun entry permit. They take you into a back room in the airport to clear the guns by serial number and make sure they are not loaded before going on to the plane. His Crown Grade Kreighoff Cowboy gun with two sets barrels is a $47K gun even in this market. I had a $50 in my pocket and I think quicker than his old ass does. I bent over and "picked up" the bill and said "Yo lo encontre." I put it on the desk and we turned around for a few minutes. Luckily, the policia had found the lost paperwork.

Africa is worse, but the bribes are much smaller.

I have stood exactly where your first two pics were taken.

Quilmes and Berettas....two of my favorite things in the world mixed together.

Your PH must be new....and I'm assuming he is since Entre Rios is still a mostly untapped province for high volume shooting.

The paloma verde build these little mud hut nests and like to do so on telephone poles in really rural locations. Phone line communication can be down for days because of the nesting habits of this bird.

At the lodge I shoot at we had a satellite relay and high speed internet. The owner of the estancia uses it to skype his supermodel daughter in NYC. No shit. I always take a tablet or netbook. I posted to ARF from the bar of Emperador Hotel in BsAs. When I'm at the ranch I just use it for emails.

True story...if you have a Nextel two way radio, you can use it in rural Argentina to speak to anyone in the USA. I'm not sure of the science or mechanics behind it, but we had a Model 21 go down with a broken firing pin and a live shell in the chamber. My partner was able to use his Nextel two way to get a hold of a gunsmith via the push to talk feature who talked us through getting the gun open and making it safe.

My shell bill was about $4k-ish. Plane tickets were $1300 if you didn't use miles. Lodge was $1200 I think. And then you tips and incidentals. I broke it all down in a couple of older threads but they have been archived. You can do it for less, but you can't do it any better.

Rough numbers.

$1400 Flight
$1500 Hunt
$150 guns
$140 Visa
$220 Tips
Shells depends on how much you shoot. But on a 3 day hunt you should shoot at least $2000 worth, I quit a bit early.

Seven Mary Three knows a lot more than I do about this shit, no doubt. My outfitter assured me that I would shoot as much as I wanted, and told me to expect at least a case in the morning and case in the evening. That is very easily done. I really had no idea what I was going to be doing so I kinda set myself some limits and I also tried to keep myself from going apeshit when I was missing. I am not much of a wing shooter. One nice thing about where we were was that it was only us, no other hunters, they do one group each trip to this place. FWIW we all tipped pretty good, hell we tip good everywhere. We all let our birdboys shoot and they do enjoy it.

Why fly halfway around the world to shoot a few boxes of shells? You go there to shoot, so shoot.