This past weekend’s excursion was international. We departed on a bus at 8:40AM on Friday morning for Mendoza, Argentina. Six of us went: Theresa, Becky (Theresa’s sister who is here visiting), Rachel, Kyle, George, and I. The bus ride was a painful seven hours, but we were rewarded with a marvelous journey through the snow-covered Andes. In the middle of this stretch of the trip through the mountains, we stopped to go through customs and immigration (both on the way to Argentina and on the way back). You can see some of the pictures I took when we got out. I didn’t take a whole lot, but you can see some buildings with only the roofs visible above the mountains of snow. There were a few (what I would call) tourist settlements throughout this stretch, but nearly all of them were closed. Not that it mattered though, they were inundated by snow.
We got to Mendoza at about 3PM, one hour ahead of Santiago time. We were immediately accosted by representatives of hostels and hotels. It was weird because every one of them had a special discount just for us. The decision to flee came quickly… I just can’t stand that kind of tourist trap. Mendozais pretty touristy. I should clarify that Mendoza refers to an Argentinean province as well as a city of about 100,000. The region is famous for wine cultivation and has recently been garnering the respect of wine enthusiasts for its production of Malbec.
We got dinner and then headed back to the bus terminal to meet Rachel who had taken a later bus. When she arrived, we debriefed: we had brochures for various hostel were about ready to pick one. However, someone had recommended The Alamo to her, so we proceeded to check it out. The situation wasn’t quite what we were looking for because the rooms were shared and there weren’t private bathrooms. So, we walked to a hotel that was pretty close, El Embajador. Their representative at the bus terminal had seemed fairly genuine, and he even gave us his name: Franco. He also didn’t disrespect us by speaking unintelligible English. We showed up to this $7/night venue, checked out the rooms, and decided tostay. It was by no means “hotel nice,” but that wasn’t what we were looking for. Before we even discovered that our bathroom doors didn’t close or that our shower was barely big enough for a small child to bath in, Franco showed up at our door with a plate of spaghetti. Rachel hadn’t eaten yet, so it was well received.
We asked him were we could purchase some of this famous Argentinean wine, and he eventually just decided to accompany George and I on a wine run(?). We talked the whole way there and back, and, when we realized we didn’t have any stemware, he offered to lend us some. A bit after we got back to the hostel, he came with glasses and a bottle opener. He was more than willing to tell us about what activities we could potentially do the next day, amongst them a wine tour, a city tour, and a tour of the mountains surrounding the city. We decided on the city tour for our morning adventure, and he volunteered to meet us at 9AM to “take us to the private tour group” who was going to conduct the tour.
We got up super early, 8AM, and attempted to sustain ourselves with three croissants and three pieces of “hardtack” (as Kyle so accurately identified it) among the six of us. At 9:10 we were still waiting for Franco, so we informed a few of the employees that we were still awaiting his arrival. The told us they would “call” him right away. However, they simply walked across the hallway and knocked on the door of the first room. Although we didn’t consider it suspicious, this was probably the first indicators that things weren’t exactly as they appeared.
When he finally emerged from his room at 930, we headed for Parque San Martin. Everything was normal. We got there, and he told us we just had to wait for our van to get there. We must have waited about half an hour, during which Franco came and went several times. I think it was now that someone hypothesized that Franco was actually our tour guide. I was ready to flee if the others were in agreement, but we decided to undertake the adventure. Eventually, a park employee told us we could get into a van that had been parked there the whole time. We just had to pay $7 each before we could start. The tour of the park was pretty good. Franco even did part of it, and he appeared to be in cahoots with the park employee. He blatantly lied about some facts and dates, but hey, 30 years isn’t that much in the grand scheme. We ended up at the zoo, which we had decided was a must-see since we arrived. Franco came with us.
The zoo was huge. I saw a lot creatures I had never seen live before. After about 3 hours of wandering we were exhausted and “had the tooth of the dragon.” Franco had a great restaurant already picked out, and he called up taxis. The restaurant was relatively large…a buffet. After Franco showed the server some sort of card, they laughed a bit then mumbled something. It seems that his reward for herding tourists to this restaurant was that he ate for free. Pretty crafty maneuver on his part. (Where can I do this in the states?) Next, after a drawn out and poorly executed conversational introduction, he told us it was his birthday. I pretended not to hear. I was just wandering where his friends were.
It was now very clear: it was time to do our own, independent activity, lest we get locked into another four-hour activity against our will. We immediately retreated to our rooms when we got back (of course we took taxis back to the hostel accompanied by Fracno). At the hostel we took a nap that lasted at least twice as long as we had planned.
We had wanted to do some shopping, so after our nap we hit the streets. The amount of the city we saw just about constituted a city tour for me… There was an entire boulevard of artisans selling their goods from little kiosks. After we followed the boulevard to its end, we found a park full of the same types of kiosks. We must have put in three hours of shopping before we ate dinner.
Dinner was good, and those of us who were looking to take advantage of being in Argentina obviously had beef and Malbec. Both were excellent.
The wine tour ended up being set aside for Sunday morning. We all wanted to explore the night life, but we were all quite tired and decided to stay in.
On Sunday morning, we decided the wine tour wasn't feasible since our bus left at 2PM. Furthermore, because of our schedule we only had time to eat one more steak. After taking care of this, we arrived at the bus terminal 10 minutes before the bus left.
There are a bunch of other things I intended to add, but it’s already taken a week to complete this entry.
I’m currently planning a trip to Peru for after the semester concludes. More details later…
