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Published: March 14th 2008
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From Malargue we headed back to San Rafael, spotting the cosmic ray detector tanks along the way and detouring by the very scenic Cañon Atuel. Tthen, after a quick lunch, hit the road to get to Tupungato for the night. This is about 60km south of Mendoza, where we actually wanted to go but, as it was the big harvest festival/vendimia weekend there was nowhere to stay..
Anyway we were happily bowling along in the afternoon sunshine noticing the occasional hailstorm protection shelter when the skies darkened and we ran into first a rainstorm then running water across the road and then the traffic stopped as we reached the evidence of a recent hailstorm, lying between 25 and 30cm deep. Looked like snow and had the same effect as a couple of snowflakes on the M25. We spent the next three hours going about three km as the local council got to work clearing the drift - and the hail had managed to fall on those three km only. Luckily when we got to Tupungato in the rain the (cheap) hotel still had a room for us and a decent restaurant.
Next day we tracked down the tourist office
Hail stops traffic
about 25cm of hail. blocked road for over two hours. Glad we only got delayed rather than hit by this to ask about the road conditions as we were thinking about taking the ripio road part way to Uspallata. The man didn´t know but we had a chat about roads and fords and hail...in spanglish. Anyway we decided to try the road and it turned out to be a really scenic and not very rough 30 odd km before we suddenly came upon a nice narrow series of gravel hairpins descending into a valley. After that we just followed the traffic on the main road to Chile from Mendoza all the way up to Uspallata.
Not much to say about Uspallata except that it is set in a scenic bowl surrounded by snow dusted peaks and that we now know it doubled as a Tibetan location for a Brad Pitt movie some years ago. We had a quiet and a bit rainy afternoonand evening before leaving the next morning to drive on to Barreal.
Barreal is in the Calingasta valley about 100km north of Uspallata with gravel and mud for all but the last 20 or so. We came here because the valley was said to be, and is, lovely with great views to the 6,000m+ peaks to
the west and to the 4000m+ peaks to the east. All had a fresh dusting of snow from the night before. It is also one of the places in South America with the darkest and clearest night skies and there are two observatories in the hills nearby. We rented a cabana for three nights and enjoyed doing not a lot for most of the time except actually visiting one of the observatories one afternoon and cooking up a parillada on our outside BBQ, and looking at the stars.
Next stop was further north as we drove to San Jose de Jachal about 250km further on, initially through the scenic valley and then across lots of scrubby desert. Jachal turned out to be a small town with a big square and an ancient and rather grisly articulated leather christ hanging in the church. But it does have a lovely new apart hotel to stay in and cook!
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