Advertisement
Mendoza is a long bus ride across the Andes away from Santiago, so we chose to make the journey at night (as per usual, to save on accommodation costs). The downside of this was the fact we’d miss out on the stunning Andes scenery as it’d be pitch black, but the plus-side was that I wouldn’t be sitting next to a Cate who was busy freaking out about the crazy mountain roads we were going over ... if you can’t see it, you can’t be scared by it (usually anyways)!
After negotiating the ridiculously busy Santiago Metro system for one last time, we pitched up at the bus terminal with 2300 pesos (£3) still left to spend before leaving the country. After I invested in a ridiculously cheap pair of sunglasses to replace my now broken Oakleys (real of course, hmmm) we were left with 1300 pesos burning a hole in our collective pocket ... Imagine Cate’s delight when she saw her favourite Chilean crisps for sale at 150 pesos each. The woman in the shop seemed unsure that Cate’s Spanish was correct when she placed the order, but you can do the math as to how many she bought
(I hasten to add that I ate half of them,
yeah and all of them weren’t eaten that night either).
Anyway we eventually ended up on the right bus (a sleeper style bus) despite the chaotic scenes at the bus station and were heading out of Chile and towards Argentina. This meant however that we had to negotiate the Chile-Argentina border crossing at 2am in the morning, not particularly pleasant when you’re standing in the freezing cold up at the top of the Andes in the middle of the night ... but after queuing for a while we were stamped out of Chile and into Argentina without too much hassle.
Strange that we received a text there, somewhere high up in the Andes when our English sim wouldn’t work in Chile at all.We headed back to the bus and assumed we’d be getting going soon, no such luck, the bus host chap came in and shouted something unintelligible in Spanish, the gist of which seemed to be that we’d be waiting for some time. Five months travelling has definitely relaxed my attitude to situations that are out of my control or my realm of understanding, if we’d have just
left home and were on a bus at a border crossing not knowing what to do or where to go, and the bus guy was shouting seemingly random phrases in Spanish I’d have been more than a little freaked out that I had no idea what was going on or what we were supposed to do. But instead we just sat there letting it all wash over us, assuming that if something needed doing or we needed to go somewhere, that everyone else would be doing it too.
So, after a long wait the bus eventually moved ... 50 metres! Some more frenzied Spanish words were uttered and everyone got out, and lined up by their hand luggage whilst the customs staff x-rayed all of our big bags. The search of our hand baggage was ridiculously unthorough; open the top of your backpack, show them the very top thing in your bag (in my case a Tupperware box), and then close it all up again. Why bother pretending to “search” everyone’s bags if you’re not going to look in them?! If anyone wants to smuggle anything naughty into Argentina, just put it at the bottom of your bag, easy-peasy!
Not that we’re condoning smuggling of course!
Despite the stupidly inept hand-baggage search they seemed pretty hot on searching through all of the big bags, and after they’d been through the x-ray machine four or five bags had been lined up for a closer inspection. One woman had been sitting near us, and she had the world’s biggest ever bag ... seemingly crammed full of lots of new clothes, which were clearly going to be sold in Argentina; Mr Customs did not seem to take very kindly to this, and spent ages picking out increasingly strange items from the carpet-bag (t-shirts ... socks ... a potty!) before seemingly fining her and sending her on her way. Before we knew it we’d arrived into Mendoza bus terminal at 6:30am in the morning having only got about an hours sleep between us, bleurgh!
The guy who pulled our bags out of the bus hatch was pretty annoyed that we had no money left to tip him, (we didn’t know we’d have to tip someone else as we’d already given our remaining money to some guy asking for tips at the border crossing.) Everyone expects tips in South America it seems. I’ll give them a tip - let me get my own stupid bag out the hatch and don’t start griping at me. Anyway, we wandered around the bus terminal for a while, trying to find a cash machine as we had no Argentinian pesos either and trying to work out how we were going to get to the hostel we had booked on Hostelworld. We were seriously underprepared but worked it out and ending up getting a taxi (which charged us nearly double what the tourist information guy had told us it would cost based on how much he pays for his taxi fare every day and the distance travelled.) Too early to argue, we got out of the cab at the hostel and checked in. As we were waiting in the reception for our room to become available, and feeling thoroughly shattered, a drilling noise from outside started up. We were not impressed and the really friendly guy at reception obviously took pity on us, telling us that we could take the apartment they also rent out in the centre of town if we wanted instead of the basement twin dorm room in the hostel. After some deliberation,
(and Matt checking out what the room was like at the hostel), we accepted the apartment gratefully and took the walk into town with our backpacks weighing us down.
The apartment was pretty cool; kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom. Not bad for 100pesos per night, (about £16,) that is apart from the paper thin window, leaking toilet and broken heating, (oh and when we tried to use the gas oven, it wouldn’t light either) but when I say that it was a really nice place to stay, I am in fact not being sarcastic. To have our own space again was so comforting and the location was really ideal. Yeah, considering we’d wangled it for the same price as our beds in the 8-bed dorm in Santiago it was a bit of a result!
For a couple of days we wandered around the streets (something that has become a common occurrence in South America), looking at the plazas and finding nice places to eat. On our first evening there, we used a restaurant recommendation from the reception guy at the hostel. All you can eat barbequed meat with accompaniments (sushi, cold meat, Chinese dishes, pizza, salad, paella, pasta, ice-cream and more), for under £7 each. Nice one. The second night we tried out a more expensive place called Azafran that had also been recommended. We got in at the right time as it was reservations only apart from one table that they let us have. A stream of people followed us in during our time there, asking for a table and being turned away - a sign of a good restaurant. The place was full. We were served warm bread rolls with pesto butter to start along with a shot of French onion soup. Then went on to our mains which were pretty good too. The steak here in Argentina really is as good as people say, even at the all-you-can-eat place although it was obviously not as posh a cut of meat it tasted beautiful, and then at the posh restaurant we indulged in some fillet and sirloin action, it’s awesome!
In the end we skulked out of the posh restaurant in a semi-hurry as I’d not left a tip because they’d really wound me up by over cooking Cate’s steak (it came out medium, and she sent it back to have it cooked a LITTLE more ... it didn’t come back for 10 minutes by which time I’d finished my meal and the fillet was barely recognisable as meat!) and we scurried home to our apartment.
Matt and Cate x
Advertisement
Tot: 0.081s; Tpl: 0.009s; cc: 7; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0457s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb