Mendoza/Santiago

What you've all been waiting for: my first journey out of the Buenos Aires area.

On Friday, February 29, after suffering through the written and spoken final examinations for our month-long Spanish Intensive, 2 friends and I set off for Retiro - home of the main bus terminal in Buenos Aires. At about 7 or 7:30, we started the 14 or 15 hour journey to Mendoza, Argentina. It became clear to me very quickly (not that I'd had many doubts in the first place) that I was going to have a good time traveling with Lennart and Peter - almost immediately after the bus left the terminal, we started in on the first of many great conversations that we would have over the course of the trip - both of these guys are very great and interesting people, and I'm really grateful that I've had opportunities like this trip to get to know them better. Besides the wonderful company, a standout for me of the ride to Mendoza was the night sky over las Pampas (the plains). I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything like it before, but it literally took my breath away in the middle of the night, after the movie when I was trying to get to sleep, when I pulled aside the curtain on the window to see what there was to see and I was hit with a sky so incredibly packed with stars. Very cool - unfortunately for all of you, photos could never capture such a thing ;)

Mendoza is a much smaller city than Buenos Aires (only 100-150,000 people) located close to the western border with Chile. Our bus got in around 9:30 or so in the morning, so the first order of business was to find something to eat and find a hostel. After stopping at a cafe for a quick medialuna (croissant), we wandered around the city for a bit searching for the tourism office. When we found it, there was of course a billion cards and fliers for everything Mendoza had to offer - hostels, restaurants, "adventure" activities like rafting, trekking, etc. We talked to the guy at the office for a bit and he pointed us in the right direction for a hostel, and then we set out for Plaza Independencia, a beautiful park in the center of the city. We found a hostel close by and set all our stuff down, etc. This was actually my first hostel experience - it was interesting, and I liked it. We got put in a "dorm" room - basically, 10 beds occupied by a really interesting variety of people. In our case, our roommates were a bunch of guys that had just gotten back the night before from climbing Aconcagua (which I'm pretty sure is the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas...) They hadn't met before doing the climb together, which apparently took about 2 weeks, but they were from all around the world and had a lot of interesting stories to tell, even if they and their stuff smelled a little bad.

That day, after lunch, we went out to book all the adventure-type stuff we wanted to do. Originally, Peter had wanted to go skydiving...but between the price of that and the fact that neither I nor Lennart would be joining him, he gave up the idea and settled for paragliding instead, something that both the guys were really excited about and that I eventually came around to. Anyway, we booked rafting for the next day (Sunday) and paragliding for the day after that, with plans to leave for Chile Tuesday morning. The rest of the day was spent just generally chilling out and exploring a bit, getting some sun in the park, buying bus tickets for the next leg of the trip, etc.

We woke up bright and early the next day to be ready for our 8:30 AM pick-up for rafting. In the van on the way there, we met some girls from the University of Michigan who were studying abroad in Santiago - it was cool to compare experiences and such. The drivers of the van were awesome, there was a playlist going that was inexplicably full of 80's and 90's chick songs, which were very well received by the Michigan girls - the drive there was a lot of fun. This was also the first time that we were really driving into the Andes. The mountains that we saw that day were really just the foothills of the mountain range, but as I had not yet seen the real thing I was incredibly impressed. Beautiful. Rafting itself was awesome, too. I had never done the real thing before and thus got a little nervous when we were being instructed on what to do if the boat flipped over and whatnot, but it turned out to be a nice ride without any problems. I liked the group in our boat, the guide was fun, and all of the dialog basically consisted of making fun of us non-Spanish speakers, but in a very nice and good-natured way ;) Then after we finished the rafting tour, we hung out at the base for a while, where they had a small deck and pool by the river. I didn't wear sunscreen, so after this I pretty much looked like a lobster for the rest of the trip, but it was a good time. We headed back to the hostel around 4. The rest of the day was occupied by napping (for me anyway) general chilling and then later on, an excellent dinner. We went to a pool hall later on where we had a couple beers and I demonstrated absolutely none of the skills that I'd managed to pull off earlier at the rafting lodge. Basically, it was a very cool day. The next day, unfortunately, did not have optimal weather for paragliding, so we weren't able to go. We occupied ourselves instead by renting bikes in the morning and giving ourselves a self-guided tour of the city. It was a lot of fun - the parts I enjoyed most were biking through the parks - where I didn't have to worry so much about dodging cars and pedestrians. As you could probably guess, the bikes were not my idea - I'm pretty sure I hadn't ridden a bike since I was 13 and I definitely almost died like 8 times. After I nearly fell off trying to avoid running over an old man, only seconds after nearly getting hit by a car, Lennart summed it up very nicely: "Elisha, I think you attract danger."

Our bus to Chile left at 7:00 the next morning. I got up at 5:45, woke up the guys after I had showered, dressed in the dark. We got our stuff together then went downstairs for a quick breakfast of bread and butter. We checked out of the hostel and went outside to the still-dark street to hail a cab to the bus station. If we had been heading in a direction other than almost exactly West, the fact that I wasn't able to get to sleep for the first couple hours of the trip would have been fine, because I would have been able to claim seeing the sunrise over the Andes. As it was, watching the mountains around us getting higher and higher and more and more spectacular was a very cool experience (see photo album).

After arriving in Santiago around 4 and finding our amazing hostel that had been recommended to us by several friendly fellow travelers, we headed out to grab something to eat and see a little bit of the city. Tuesday was a fairly uneventful day, we booked the city tours that we would take on Wednesday and Thursday, tried a new fruit (tunas) which the really cool girl at who worked at the hostel showed us how to eat - her first piece of advice: carefully! The fruits have spots on them that just look like spots, but really they're tiny clusters of little spines, and because we didn't know this until she told us, Lennart's hands were full of them for a while after. The hostel was awesome - if anyone ever plans on spending time in Santiago, Hostel Plaza de Armas comes highly recommended. It's on the top floor of this really old building, and it overlooks Plaza de Armas, a plaza full of pine trees, artists, and street performers that is bordered by some of Santiago's most impressive architecture.

That night, in the process of finding a restaurant and eating dinner, we discovered that Santiago maybe isn't as friendly a city as Buenos Aires, and is significantly more expensive. We took a taxi out to Bella Vista, which we had been told would be the best part of the city to hang out in for dinner and maybe something afterwards. The taxi charged us too much and only took us to the outskirts of the barrio - we didn't really like what we saw so we got dinner and went back the hostel. The next day we had our city tour, which was cool. We walked around the city and got to know it a little better, and we even saw a cute little play about the founding of Santiago. Our guide was really cool - during the tour, we saw the good side of Bella Vista, and the guide recommended us a club for that night as well. After the tour, Peter chilled out in the hostel while Lennart and I took a short walk to see the Palace, stopping for some ice cream (helado) on the way, which did not in any way compare to the helado in Buenos Aires. The palace was beautiful, and afterwards we ducked into Starbucks (they don't have them in Buenos Aires, nor, apparently, in the Netherlands, so this was quite the treat for Lennart) for a coffee and some conversation. After heading back to the hostel, checking our email and collecting Peter, we headed out to Bella Vista again (the good part this time), had some dinner, and then left for the club that our guide had recommended to us (El Clandestino). Definitely a more enjoyable night overall.

Thursday we had another tour, but this time of a small coastal town called Isla Negra. Here we were given a tour of one of the houses of Pablo Neruda, Chile's Nobel-Prize winning poet. The house was really interesting - Neruda was a definite eccentric, with collections of everything from sea-shells to insects to old ships' figureheads, all of which decorated various parts of the house. Neruda wasn't the reason we chose Isla Negra, though - this tour marked the first time that Peter, Lennart, or myself had seen the Pacific Ocean. After the tour in Isla Negra and a little time to take in the sea, we went to a small town called Pomaire for a late lunch. The restaurant can definitely be described as "authentic" - it was in a large, barn-like structure, with a dirt floor and various animals (cats, chickens...) running around. The food was delicious though, and afterwards we were able to walk around the town a little bit - a town known for its crafts, especially copperworks and ceramics.

We didn't have much time left after we returned to Santiago from the tour - we hung out in the hostel for a little bit, then went to get something to eat. We didn't have time to go too far, so we ended up in a mall food court, where I was assaulted by signs for every single type of American fast food - KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Burger King, McDonalds - seeing all of these together in such a small space was a little overwhelming. But we ate and then headed back to the hostel to collect our stuff, then left for the bus station, to catch our bus back to Mendoza that would be leaving at 11. The ride back was mostly taken up by sleeping, save the one part where we had to go through customs at about 3 AM, in the middle of the frigid Andes. But we arrived safely back in Mendoza at around 7 AM and then spent wayy too long trying to find a hostel where we could sleep for a few hours before having to get ready for our paragliding appointment (that we had re-scheduled after being disappointed on Monday) at 3:30 that afternoon. But with the help of a kind gentleman at a bed and breakfast who made some calls for us, we were able to find one and get a couple hours of sleep which were desperately needed (and showers, too). Then, after a quick lunch it was time for paragliding! There was a little bit of a scare with the weather, we thought that again, all of us might not be able to go, but then the sky cleared up and everyone was able to jump. Very cool - I'll try to post the video here so the facebook-less can see it as well.

After all this, it was finally time to return to Buenos Aires. Our bus went through the night and we got into B.A. around noon on Saturday. We had paid a few extra pesos to get the better seats this time around, so it was a lot easier to sleep on the way back than it had been before. We shared a taxi back from the bus station in Retiro and then parted ways. It was a great trip, with great people, and could be directly responsible for me developing a bit of an addiction to travel - since returning from Mendoza, I've already spent a weekend in Montevideo, Uruguay and plans are in the works to head to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as well. Sorry it took so long to tell you all about it, but you can expect one or two more posts soon, there has been some interesting stuff going on in Argentina the past couple weeks that I think deserves a mention. Miss you guys!

Photo Album
Parapente Takeoff