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La Cumbre
A little further up the mountain from Celia's houseIt's been a while...
It's been a while since I wrote my last blog, but also since I had a holiday. Nearly a year. That's about to be rectified as I'm heading off during the winter holidays. However, I took advantage of one of Agentina's many bank holidays to go away for a long weekend.
Given that Argentina created more bank holidays last year, so that this year there is at least one bank holiday a month, you would have thought that there would be plenty of opportunity to travel or escape. Don't get me wrong, it's extremely easy to get away for the weekend, but I'm more hesitant to do so. There are various reasons, finding someone to look after the cats is the main one, but work has a habit of getting in the way. Also given the size of Argentina most places are far away, and budget air travel is a foreign concept. Therefore, the only way to travel is by bus. Which isn't as bad as it could be. Argentina is prepared for long distance bus travel. Depending on your budget you can get seats ranging from
cama (which fully recline like a bed) through
semi-cama to bog-standard regular seats. Some companies even run
servicio ejecutivo where you get food throughout your journey, starting with aperatifs and ending with an after-dinner whiskey... When I compare this to the types of buses I would get in Thailand and think nothing of sitting on them for countless hours...
However, I decided that enough was enough and I needed to get away. Work had been driving me crazy, and I wanted to get out of the city. My boss Celia has a home up a mountain in Cordoba province, and traditionally she had always invited teachers to stay. So when she invited me, I decided to go. It's a 12 hour bus journey, so we would leave on the Thursday night after class, and I would come back on the Sunday night, getting back to Buenos Aires on Monday morning. I could have got a bus back on the Monday night, as Monday was the actual holiday, but I didn't relish the prospect of having a sleepless night and then having to teach all day...
So Thursday came around and after a long day teaching I headed home to feed the cats and collect my bags.
La Cumbre
Celia's house I'd arranged for a friend to come round and feed the cats over the weekend, so I left them with big bowls of food and all their toys in the living room to entertain them and made my way to the train station. I met my boss there and we got the train to Retiro to catch the bus. We had
semi-cama which were comfy enough, we had also chosen the individual seats, which meant not having to climb over someone to go to the toilet, or be climbed over.
I've never been good at sleeping on buses or planes, and that journey was typical. To make matters worse the weather was atrocious, as were basically travelling through a thunder storm... and being on the top deck of a double decker which was swaying quite a lot as the driver seemed to be racing against something... well it wasn't the most comfortable journey.
Luckily the rain stopped when we arrived at Cordoba capital (lucky for us, not so lucky for the province which is suffering a severe drought), and most people got off. We had another couple of hours travel ahead of us to
La Cumbre, so we left
La Cumbre
Celia's house our seats to sit at the front of the bus so I could get a better view of the scenery and the villages we passed through as the bus made it's way higher and higher into the sierras.
On arriving in La Cumbre we woke ourselves up with tea and
medialunas (Argentine croissants) in a little café across from the bus station. If it wasn't for the very Argentine medialunas, I would have doubted that we were still in Argentina as almost all the people in the café were speaking English. I had heard that the Anglo-Argentine community was very big in La Cumbre, but I guess I needed to see it to believe it. After pottering around doing some errands and doing some shopping for food for the weekend, we collected Celia's jeep and made our way up the mountain. I should point out here that my boss is partially blind, especially for things up close, but that doesn't stop her driving her 30+ year old jeep up the mountain every time she is here. I just trusted that she knew her mountain. We didn't have any problems.
Friday was just spent pottering around and relaxing. Celia
La Cumbre
Celia's house very recently had solar panels fitted on to the roof, so there is now electricity and hot water, which makes a difference. I had heard tales from teachers of eating and reading by candlelight...
On Saturday Celia had arranged with a local taxi driver to take us on a tour of the surrounding area. We headed out after lunch, first stop
Los Terrones. Los Terrones is a national park in the
Quebrada de la Luna which over time has been eroded by the weather to leave behind some astonishing scenery. We opted for the short trek, which takes you out to a mirador/viewpoint, where on a clear day you can see for miles. Back in the car we drove through and over the
Valle de la Ongamira on our way to
Santa Catalina. Santa Catalina is famous for its Jesuit church. When the Jesuits came to Argentina, one of their biggest areas of influence was Cordoba. The church at Santa Catalina is one of the most impressive I've seen in a long time. We had just arrived and were debating whether to have our picnic before or after visiting the church when this guy came up and started hugging Celia.
La Cumbre
Celia's house It turned out that he was the son of one of her best friends, and he was there with his wife, who was celebrating the birthday of a friend in a restaurant by the church. The restaurant owner was a friend of the group and also the ex-husband of the daughter of the Diaz family that owns the land and the estancia where the church was built. We had bumped into them just as they were about to visit the estancia. They invited us to join them, which we did. It was only later that Celia explained to me that no-one gets to visit the house and the lands as the family still use them as a summer home, normally you see the church and nothing else. So we definitely were in the right place at the right time. We got a guided tour of the house and the grounds before going into the church for free.
Back in La Cumbre I did some
alfajor shopping. Alfajors come in all different shapes, styles and flavours, but the ones from Cordoba are some of my favourite, especially
these ones.
Sunday was a lazy day. After a lie-in we went up the
La Cumbre
Celia's house mountain a bit, before heading back down to La Cumbre so I could catch my bus.
The return trip wasn't as eventful as the stormy one on the way to La Cumbre, but I still didn't get much sleep, but I had planned for that, and was able to spend Monday morning in bed before meeting up with some friends to go to Argentina - Albania football friendly that was being played locally...
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