Two Beers and a Pretzel

Today I took a 10 hour driving tour (in Spanish) to see Cerro Aconcagua and the ‘Christ the Redeemer of the Andes’ statue.

A valley not dissimilar to the Western parts of the Yosemite valley takes you West of Mendoza to view Aconcagua.  This mountain is HUGE…  6,962m or 22,841 ft.  We viewed it from a vista at about 2900m and probably a dozen kilometers away.

If you look just at the lower peak, the large ice shelf is about 300m thick.

Then we drove up a very windy gravel road to just under 4000m to the ‘Christ the Redeemer of the Andes’ statue.  The statue was raised in 1904 on the Border after a treaty between Chile and Argentina regarding where the actual border is…

I had a hot chocolate served by the happy staff.

On the way back we stopped by an Inca mineral mine where sulfur leaches out old volcanic pools.  I’d hate to be the guy who had to haul Sulfur back to Cuzco…

There was a market with tons of geode’s and volcanic minerals along with Inca-like clothing, but my favorite crowd shot of the day was a guy doing the thinking man pose…

Finally, the full color of the mountains was exposed on the way back to Mendoza…

Red, Green, Orange, Brown, and a blue sky all in one pic…

And all in one mountain…

And a neat erosion pattern…

The guy who owns the hostel also runs a paragliding company… so guess what I’m doing tomorrow?!?!?!

Jeez, my knees hurt.  That fall on the mountain bike the other day was pretty hard…  I’m really lucky to not have anything broken.  Other than that, I somehow managed to catch a cold the other day, which is now in it’s final stages.

It was raining in Bariloche and I was in pain, so I left.  I said goodbye to Erin & Katie at the bus terminal (they’re going to Buenos Aires) and caught a pretty nice recliner-seat bus to Mendoza.  I arrived at 8 AM this morning in Mendoza after a decent 18 hour bus ride on the Andesmar bus line.  Better food than QueBus, and they played decent movies (Transformers, The Untouchables – both en ingles, and a pretty good Argentine Indie flick with english subtitles).  I saw a guy from the bus trip from Ushuia to Calafate and we talked for a bit.  It’s still funny running into people you know from somewhere 1000 miles ago…

At the bus station I had no idea where I was going to stay.  A guy names Marcos gave me a brochure for his hostel.  It looked pretty nice, and it’s $10 USD per night.  He drove me to the place and it was nice with immediate room available (where the more popular hostels have 2PM check-in times).  So I paid for a night, booked a wine tour in the afternoon and set out for a much needed nap.

The tour bus came to pick me up around 2:45 PM.  It took a group of about 12 to the nearby city of Maupi where we toured a number of places…

First stop was a family owned distillery.  The owner descended from swiss parents, so he had a number of European recipe liquors.  Vodka, Whiskey, Schnapps (including Kirshvasser), Absynthe, and a number of chocolate liquers.  He also made home made salsas, jams, and chocolates.  During the tasting I tried his “Russian Death” shot – a spicy peppered vodka that tasted kind of like cinnamon schnapps, but hotter. It seemed to me that this guy turned his hobby into a viable job.  He was excited and immensely proud of everything in the place – as he should be, it was all pretty good.

Then we stopped at a small family vineyard that did specialty small batch vintages and had very good Malbec.  I bought some Vino for dinner tomorrow.  Not much worth photographing though…

From there we went to another small, family owned business that made olive oil…  pretty neat, as I had never seen olive oil production before, and we got some artesan bread to try the oil with.

Finally, we went to the largest winery in the valley.  I got a private tour as the only English speaker.  Nice facility, but the wine is targeted at mass markets, so it’s not very complex, and tastes “thin” to me.  They did have a pretty cool room that you could rent for events…  Lined with French Oak barrels from 1910.

Back at the hostel, Marcos drove me to a neat area in the center of town so I could find a place to eat.  He told me it was safe to walk back to the hostel (about 3km).  I chose a place with Bife de Chorizo.  It was one monster piece of meat plus beer for $10.  Easily the size of your average meat-loaf.

So tomorrow is a business day.  I have to square away my ticket to the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu (probably the 13th-16th), when I’m going to Bolivia and lake Titikaka (and the beautiful salt flats that are about to be destroyed to make lithium batteries for electric cars), if I stay in Mendoza for the Vendimia wine festival that starts on Thursday, and where I go after South America…