Santiago & Mendoza (16-21/Mar/06)

San Juan, Argentina

Dropped by Juan Pablo & Veronica in Santiago, a couple we met when we were living in Barcelona (Juan Pablo studied with Raf). Esther managed to leave her GoreTex jacket in Valparaiso, but luckily JuanPa's cousin was there, and on his way to Santiago, so we soon had it in our possession again. Only her thermal t-shirts (in Bariloche) are now AWOL! Well, and a knife, and the mobile, and the handle for the kitchen pots...

We arrived late on Thursday, and on Friday set off to explore. Walked round the centre, checked out the stock market, the fruit & fish market, the San Cristobal peak & park, and the main avenues in the centre. Decided it was a city we could definitely live in if we had to (Esther has her sights on working for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean for a bit, which may stretch out this trip by another year). Just a long shot.

Saturday Juan Pablo & Veronica were sadly not around as they had a family lunch, so we headed off into the great unknown again. Plan A had been to go to the Maipo valley, but we ditched it as it was a bit late. So we walked around a few more parts of Santiago and popped into a couple of museums to remind us about wot this culture stuff is all about innit.

In Valparaiso we'd heard Manu Chao was playing in Santiago on the 24th, but then realised he was actually in Mendoza on the 19th which fitted neatly in our plans. Getting tickets had been impossible over the phone so we got an early bus on Sunday morning to Argentina and hoped for the best. The ride over is amazing, through a very impressive part of the Andes, and right next to the highest peak in South America, Aconcagua. After dumping the rucksacks in the nearest hostel we zipped off to the stadium and luckily got hold of a couple of tickets. The concert was, as expected, great. However the crowd wasn’t as crazy as initially expected, and Manu’s decision a while back to drop the wind section (to make logistics easier apparently) was pretty noticeable (the songs in Barcelona a few years ago were soooo much better).

Mendoza is the wine capital of Argentina, so a good place to be. When we woke up on Monday we headed to the best local bodega for the free tour and tasting. The tour wasn’t very inspiring but you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth I suppose. I wanted to do a proper wine tasting course but hadn’t read the guide properly and we had gone to the wrong bodega. Ah well, next time. Back in Spain, in La Rioja.

Tuesday was climbing day, this time proper leading, only we did do more than half of top rope as we are pretty crap on real rock. Practice will make perfect. Or at least less afraid of falling. Then in the evening we started digging out information about climbing (well, trekking really) to the top of Aconcagua for next year (a bit too late in the season right now). 6959m is quite daunting, as is 1600 euros. We’ll be trying out our lungs on smaller 5000m peaks in Bolivia to see if we are capable or if we’ll just be wasting our money.

Bit of a plan muddle today. We’d decided to visit the Lunar Valley (not in the original plan) and then head off to a couple of spots in Chile (Elqui valley and La Serena) which the guide said might be worth seeing. But it turned out the bus connections all fell apart, so we ended up getting a ticket straight to Salta and changing the route into Bolivia slightly. Sitting down for a spot of lunch after buying the ticket we obviously then found the perfect connection for the original plan. But as we would loose 30% for cancelling, plus the bits we skip aren’t that inspiring, we decided to stick to our guns and spend more time in Salta. A 15h bus ride awaits…