Advertisement
Published: August 7th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Stuart on Horseback
Arguably the slowest horse in the world and the result of the rather large foothill found on Stuart's butt the morning after 10hrs riding! We arrived in Mendoza fresh from an overnight bus journey from the most boring city ever - Cordoba, see previous blog for details…
Mendoza immediately struck us as being a beautiful town, with wide tree lined streets, plenty of pedestrian areas, and a great casual air. It is also really easy to get around, with a big central park (Plaza) and four satellite plazas spaced evenly to make the town look like a 5 on a dice. We also quickly found a huge public park with a lake in the middle, where we were able to run in peace and safety - bliss.
Mendoza is the capital of the Argentinean wine making region and is nestled below the foothills of the Andes. So a beautiful setting for a beautiful city.
We ended up staying 3 days longer than we had initially planned and used the time to chill out and explore the town and the surroundings.
Wine tour on bikes Of course, we had to take advantage of all that wine in the area, so we headed out to the wineries about 10k out of town and hired a couple of bikes for the afternoon. We toured
Aconcagua signature shot
... but this time we were at the bottom (technicality really!) around 4 wineries and sampled the plonk in each. We had a great time since we were lucky enough to arrive as they were harvesting the grapes and we got to watch them being crushed, a special experience. The only slight draw back was the busy road connecting the wineries, full of large fast buses and trucks that appeared to be oblivious to us on our wee bikes. This seemed to be much less intimidating at the end of the tour for some reason….
To the Chile border After hanging out in town for a few days, we felt the need for some serious countryside, so we hired a small car and headed for the border with Chile. The border here is basically the Andes, there is the modern border which is a tunnel under the mountains and the old border which is on top of the mountains at about 4000m.
We passed through some gorgeous countryside as we made our way, huge snow capped mountains across the horizon, desert landscape foothills leading down to lush green valleys. The road follows the old, now defunct, TransAndean rail line that follows the Andes, an amazing feat of engineering: we
In Mendoza
locals can still be seen on their horse drawn carts saw many tunnels and bridges painstakingly built at some point now lying unused.
The town of Portrerillos was a pleasant surprise. From the adverts in our hostel, we expected a full on tourist trap, but it turned out to be a pleasant tiny town on a huge lake where we had a nice stop and a huge Lomo (meat sandwich) for lunch.
We spent a couple of nights in a hostel outside the town of Uspallata. Bad move as it turns out - the hostel was being run by a couple of skanky birds from New Zealand. (Tony and Amanda, can you tell this pair to clean it up a little? You must know them - all being from NZ)….
We took advantage of the situation though and went horse riding through the foothills. After arranging it with the skanky birds, we weren’t quite sure what to expect, but it all looked good in the morning when a local dude named Ivan turned up with three horses to take us off to explore. We had a great day trekking gradually upwards into the mountains. We thought our steeds were a touch docile as it was hard to
MATE cart
for the locals to top up their MATE cups to fulfil their addiction! get them above anything more than a casual slow walk, but on reflection we reckon they were just old and tired of carrying bloody tourists around the country.
Anyway, we were joined on our trip by three stray dogs from the local area. They were mangy mutts who followed us diligently all day. This was a bit of a mystery to us as there was no obvious reason for them to stick around with us. Then we stopped for lunch and Ivan prepared some barbeque for us. It became clear that Ivan and his cooking skills were famous amongst the local dogs and they were soon chomping down some prime, badly cooked, steaks….
The day went well and ended with a lovely 2 hour horse stroll through the moonlight, arriving back to the hostel after 9pm. This was a lovely surprise addition to the trip and would have been more appreciated if we thought it was deliberate and not an indication of Ivan’s terrible sense of time and navigation.
One advantage of the night time trek was that we both saw the same shooting star (first time for both of us) - a special moment.
As
we continued towards the border we went to visit the highest mountain in the world outside the Andes. Aconcagua is 6962m high and is a stunning mountain. Apparently not too hard to climb, but we decided to leave it for this trip!
Finally, we got to the border and took our wee hire car up a 9km steep winding dirt track to the border. It was very impressive, towering peaks all around us, crossing above the snow line and a very imposing statue of Christ right at the top marking the border. A few pictures and a quick peak down the other side to the Chilean mountains and we were off again.
On the way back to Mendoza, we spent a night in a lovely wooden cabin on the outskirts of Uspallata and ate a great Italian meal next door. All a very refreshing change from the hostel life we are getting used to and the heavy Argentinean cuisine.
Turtles on Tour - Our three dog companions were quickly nicknamed FoxDog (the shifty looking brown one), BlindDog (kept bumping into things and had weird eyes) and SlaverDog (the one who enjoyed his steak so much he
thanked Wendy with a shower of slavers…..)
- Wendy´s first experience of driving on the right hand side of the road. Enough said.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.342s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 24; qc: 93; dbt: 0.1042s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
Gordon
non-member comment
Mendonca
Beats me why anybody would want to do a world tour of Mendonca.