Ugly Mendoza

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I didn´t really like Mendoza and neither did most people I met. The "Bible", or Lonely Planet, says that it´s stunningly picturesque, which it most certainly is not. It´s in the middle of the desert so it´s pretty dusty, the streets are heavily tree-lined, which means you can´t see very far and gives it a slightly claustrophobic feel, and there never seemed to be many people about, which made it feel quite sketchy. In fact, the first night I was there, 4 people from my hostel were nearly mugged.

I met up with Marc from my BA Spanish school in Mendoza and we went on an afternoon wine tour. Unfortnately, we´d booked through his HI hostel, so we were with lots of "party" people. I didn´t think much of the wine we were given to taste, and the wineries weren´t as pretty as I was expecting either. I was planning on doing a winery tour by bicycle but decided against it after that. Luckily, I was staying in a really really great hostel (Hostel Lao - it felt more like a shared house than a hostel) and pretty much all of us (12 people) went out on the Friday night to a wine tasting that was being held in town to celebrate the weekend before the start of the wine festival, or some such event. We paid 25 pesos (about 4 quid) for 6 wine tickets and started off tasting each wine and making notes on its flavour. After about 4, I gave up on that and even lost my pen. I also won an extra glass of wine in a darts game. We got back to the hostel at about 2.30 and all went straight to bed. An hour later, Francisco, the guy on duty at the hostel, came up to our room and woke us all up, saying to come downstairs and go outside. I didn´t really know what was going on at the time as my head was swimming with booze, but it was the earthquake. When I got downstairs, the lights were swinging from the ceiling and the water in the pool outside was sloshing about. Mendoza has been levelled by an earthquake in the past, so Francisco was understandably worried. Things stopped shaking, but as we headed upstairs again there was an aftershock, so down we came again. We decided to make use of the internet to find out where the epicentre was and therefore determine how much danger we were in. It didn´t take too long to find out that it was near Concepcion in Chile. While we were doing this, a girl came out of her room on the ground floor (she obviously hadn´t woken up when Francisco had knocked) and asked us to be quiet seeing as it was the middle of the night. She wasn´t having any of it when we explained what had happened. I think she thought we were joking as she sarcastically replied, "Yes, there have been 3 earthquakes since midnight." She was even seen making a complaint to reception the next morning!

I took it easy the next day, lounging about by the pool, reading (a great book and very apropos for a traveller - The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho), and working on my translation.

I was really glad to leave Mendoza as I really didn´t like the vibe, but I was quite sad to leave such a lovely bunch of people in such a gorgeous house.

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Photos

Mendoza (6)
View from the ugly park

Mendoza (12)
Chilling out in gorgeous, sociable Hostel Lao

Comments

[Dad]

Translation
Thanks again for the great blogs. Looking forward to more photographs! Do take care....! What are you translating? With our love

[emskibub]

Translating
Oh, sorry, did I forget to say?! It´s for a museum in Punta Arenas about the indigenous tribes of the area and what happened to them when white man came. It´s the little explanation cards in the display cases. There´s quite a lot of it!