Advertisement
Published: September 7th 2016
Edit Blog Post
So, I enjoyed the good vibes of Mendoza, and also hanged out with some other travelers I met at the Hostel, some from Israel, like two Israeli girls traveling together since they met at Uruguay. They really made me want to travel there. Some were from other parts of the world - one of them was a really nice young carpenter from the UK. He was talking about a very common thing among 20' something years old young guys from the western culture – he was talking about how all he does is to build stuff for rich people and he was thinking about changing for a more meaningful job. That sounded familiar - generation Y characteristics and so on. I tried to give him some ideas, but don’t know if I was useful. Any how it was really nice talking to him and to his girlfriend.
After a couple of days in Mendoza, I decided to visit the small town of uspallata ("Uspazata", in Argentina the "ll" is spelled like "z" more or less) - the town is located on the road from Mendoza to the Chilean boarder (and to Santiago de Chile). A very scenic road surrounded by
the Andes Mountains region. The town itself is located in a valley, at 2039m above sea level, and is surrounded by high peak mountains, streams and great scenery all around. Because this scenery resembles to the highland in central Asia, the town and area was picked as the filming location of the movie "seven years in Tibet" (starring Brad Pitt), a very interesting and recommended movie in my opinion, telling the true story of an Austrian climber how got to Tibet in 1939, during WW-2, and became very close with the young Dalai lama.
The view along the bus ride from Mendoza to uspallata was beautiful – and so were the surrounding of town – the Andes all around, like you can see in the pictures attached. Before coming to uspallata I booked in advance two nights at a small hostel – "Samadi" hostel which was a few minutes' walk from the only main street of town. The Hostel turned out to be very authentic – made out of real wood, had a small nice kitchen and a welcoming owner, relativity young and patriotic Argentinian. I asked for his recommendation for activities to do around town and he was
really nice and gave good guidance about things to do around uspallata.
Listening to his recommendations, on the next day I rented bicycles, in order to do a half a day cycling toward the mountain of the seven colors – "Cerro de siete colores". The cycling to the mountain was really nice, I kept looking backwards to see the magnificent view of the snow caped mountains behind me, and after a few hours of cycling in a moderate up hill, I sow a small sign mentioning that I got to the destination – and of course I could see the colored mountain in front of me. There was a funny moment over there when I put down my back pack close to the small sign, in order to take a picture, just to prove I was there… and suddenly – the sign fell down. I felt amused and embarrassed all at the same time. I felt like one of those notorious Israeli careless travelers. Honestly, I felt bad for my own careless for a moment but then I realized that the poll of the sign was held only by some stones and that it was not actually buried in
ground. So I lifted the poll back to its place and organized the stones around it once again and for my relief… it was standing again.
I took some pictures with the different colors of the mountain (red, green, brown and so) and started to follow my steps (ride) back to uspallata – now, most of it was downhill and was supposed to be short and smooth. After about half an hour – I felt secure enough to let go the breaks. Well, now is a good moment to mention that the bicycle were pretty lousy – the first pair I got was lacking a balanced gear shifting so I asked to replace it to this pair, but still there were problems – the pair was lacking a good rear break. Since I already changed one pair of bikes I didn’t want to change another and so I set off to the trip without a good rear brake.
On the way to the mountain it was all Ok, uphill you know. You don't need to use a lot of the brake... On the way back – downhill is a different story… SO, after about a Half an hour
paddling back I tripped! I guess it was a small stone or something, and because I felt so relaxed cycling downhill, in front of the great view – I forgot about my poor rear break and so, when I hit the brake, after tripping, it didn’t helped a lot. The outcome, of course, was to squeeze the front break hard, which made me of course to roll over with the bikes and to fall straight to the ground. On my way to the ground I hit the stirring wheel, which was unfortunately part of my landing surface. That resulted in a few seconds of a short breathing and a big pain on my right side, just were my ribs were….
After a few seconds I got up, tried to organize my breathing and knew that that cycling was over… I walked about an hour and a half back to town. The view was still amazing but my stomach and chest's right side was hurting a lot… of course I coursed the bike renting guy for giving me this bicycle with a lousy rear brake and gave it back to him, hoping he won't check them to see that after
that crash there were new small problem with the bikes.
Luckily He did not noticed and I walked to the nearest café – to calm myself down. The café name was "café Tibet" – taken from the name of the movie that was filmed in town. I eat, rested a bit, texted some friends (without saying something about the small injury) and relaxed. I went back to the hostel and spend a quite night in doors, chatting with the other gusts which turned out to be very nice.
Next time – a short trek to the Aconcagua Mountain's view point and then heading back to Mendoza, Still with a souring rib…
Advertisement
Tot: 0.077s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 9; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0473s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb