Mendoza A: San Rafael

I guess I ought to write about my trip to mendoza before it gets superceded by my occupation with more current events (as it has already to some extent). The thing about this trip was that I did a pretty bad job of it; that is to say, I didn’t do many of the things that one is “supposed” to do when one goes to the places to which I went. But a pesar de todo, I still managed to have lots of really cool and interesting experiences. It was generally just a matter of not letting my enjoyment of them be ruined by regret or even “guilt” that I wasn’t enjoying myself in the “proper” way.

For example, I never toured any vineyards. I fully intended to, but what happened was that I planned to visit vineyards from the city of San Rafael, where I spent the second half of my time more or less after coming south from the capitol city of the province, Mendoza (is the name of both the province and the capitol, I mean). I knew sort of on a less conscious level that perhaps I was doing things backwards, that you were supposed to see wine in the city of mendoza and do outdoorsy stuff in San Rafael. But the image I had developed of San Rafael as a result of reading my travel book was of an utterly flat place where todo el mundo gets around on bicycles and where there are several vineyards within fairly easy biking distance. It seemed like a perfect plan. And it would have been, in spite of not being the “right” place to realize it, had I not forgotten to take into account that on Sundays people in small latin provincial cities and towns do absolutely nothing, and that includes renting out bicycles and showing me their wine manufacturing processes (not to mention letting me taste their wine). The first part I discovered quickly as I walked futilely throughout the quaint little place and found doors closed and chained at all the bicileterias I could think of/run into. So, as is often my recourse I set out on foot. As the kilometers passed me by, I quickly encountered vineyard after vineyard (as well as a few olive groves), each with a large-attention grabbing sign pronouncing “Tourists, stop here!”, each locked and quiet as a tomb. So that was it. I had to leave that same day at 6:30. I was going to complete a trip to Mendoza province without seeing any wine being made at all. Yet somehow I couldn’t convince myself to lament my so-called failure. The environment surrounding me was just too idyllic, to beautiful, for me to possibly be in a bad mood while I remained amidst it. To illustrate this first I’ll tell you a little bit about the region.

Mendoza province is in the desert. Abutting and partially containing the Andes, it is home to the mountain range’s highest peak, Cerro Aconcagua. But this place that should be a dry rocky wasteland, is instead a man-made oasis. Thanks to an irrigation system created by the pre-colombian civilizations, the cities are filled with and shaded by trees, and the flat desert plains are covered with grape and olive vines. It is by far Argentina’s (and probably south america’s) premier wine-producing region, in terms of both quantity and quality.

All this gives a perhaps distinct look the place. The city sidewalks are lined with these open water canals, some of which flow powerfully with clear water and tempt one to bather oneself (or at least tempt me to bathe myself) in them, others of which are stagnant and filled with trash, others of which are dry. The most important result of these though is that they allow absolutely all the sidewalks to be lined with leafy green trees. So when one approaches one of these cities from a distance one sees it as if it were a grove of trees sprouting from the flat emptiness of the desert.

When one gets closer to the city, however, one sees the vineyards spreading out around it, column after column of sort of fantastically (in the sense of doctor seuss-like I mean) wizened little plants. I assume those are where the grapes come from, though I never actually saw any grapes. The first trees that one encounters are rows of majestic poplars, demarcating properties, lining the roads in a way that to me recalls classical greece for some reason, and casting spectacularly long shadows during most of the day. If you’ve talked much with me, I’ve probably told you at some point about how much I love poplar trees, and that if I ever have an estate there’ll be rows of them por todos partes. It would be very difficult for me to put into words what these trees do for me, the kinds of images they seem to recall.

Back to the canals though. As one ventures out of the city the canals widen and spread, and as they do so the water becomes clearer, and rushes more quickly, as if they were just little stone streams running in straight lines along the fields and roads. More importantly though, as the water begins to accumulate and flow in deeper streams it takes on a gorgeous emerald color, the reason for which I couldn’t tell you. Raquel said it was because it’s mountain water, which somehow makes sense although I don’t understand why.

So this gives you a bit of an idea of my surroundings. You’ve got the vines spreading out in all the directions, the majestic poplars (which also created a pleasant shade), and the gorgeous emerald canals fulls of clear rushing water. The houses were also of note- the humblest ones seemed to have been built with a sort of relaxed sloppiness that attested to the luxury of a simple and tranquil life, while the more expensive palatial ones appeared to be constructed in a careful mimicry of this same “esthetic,” if you can call it that.

Yes, so everything converged to make me feel as if I was in an idealized version of the french or italian countryside from some movie made a few decades ago. The white wine in my bag, leftover from the previous night’s dinner, the fact that practically the sole modes of transportation seemed to be mopeds, bicyles, and old Citroens, and the mysterious walled convent I passed completed the picture (although whatever “romance” or mystery the latter had was tempered a bit by the barbed wire and shards of broken glass that lined the wall and served as a quick jolt of reality).

So I hope that account, as much as it strained my descriptive abilities and seriously risked slipping into corniness, has done something to mitigate the initial mildly gloomy tone of the present entry. I´m still missing the description of the town of San Rafael itself, which I think I found equally idyllic during my intial paseo around town. So here it is in somewhat truncated form: kind of like Mendoza, but smaller and consequently cleaner and generally less large-latin-american-city-like. Sidewalk-side canals with considerably cleaner water. More bicycle, fewer cars. A preponderance of absolutely unbelievably hermoso parks and plazas- upon discovering the central plaza of the city, I came to the quite sudden realization that these people just do parks better than us. Maybe it´s the palm trees or the many elaborate statues and monuments, I don´t know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they spend more time in them, or maybe it's the european aristocratic influence. But they just in general seem more beautifully landscaped and manicured yet at the same time untamed and eden-like. The other big park, much larger than the one I just mentioned and more dominated by playing kids made me seriously nostalgic for my childhood.
One last, though by no means exhaustive, detail about San Rafael- it runs on an extremely rigid schedule (at least with respect to sleep-wake cycles). In the larger cities and I think in the U.S. in general people are more just kind of all over the place, but here everyone seems to live by the same pattern. As a consequence, the streets are ither quite lively (perhaps even bustling), or utterly dead. It´s like all those cultural customs that we learned about in high school spanish class are actually still allive here- the people really do all go for a walk before dinner, and everything really does shut down completely during the afternoon siesta. And Sundays- forget about it. I WANTED to buy wine and postcards on Sunday afternoon before leaving, but I COULDN´T. Eveyrone was actually too busy enjoying the weekend to waste time selling me stuff.

I wrote about San Rafael first I suppose because the memory was more salient (being more recent), but really it's my time in the capitol that´s chronologically anterior. But to avoid making this a disgustingly long mammoth of an entry I´ll cut things short here, at least for now.

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