आफ्टर सत. पैट्रिक'स Day

I don't know what is up with the weird characters in the title. My browser has a goat add on, so that could have something to do with it.

Anyway, back to the long overdue updating, starting with a couple days after St. Patrick's Day 09.

We left Bariloche on a deluxe bus. A 19 hour bus ride sounds pretty bad, but if you get the fully reclining seats on Andesmar, it really isn't too bad. They give you decent meals, wine, champagne, movies. There's even a bingo game.

Bariloche is on the border between the mountains and the dry plains. Just to the east it looks a lot like Eastern Washington. I think Zach and Shane should go buy some waterfront property there.


Our next stop was Mendoza. Mendoza has about 400,000 people in the area. It has a nice downtown area with some nice squares and a bunch of fountains all over.





Mendoza is about 10 miles to the east of the front range of the Andes. The real Andes are another 100 or so miles to the east.

We spend a couple days hanging out in town. One day we took a walk through the big city park. It is pretty nice by the downtown entrance. The farther away you get from that, the less they feel like cutting the grass or picking up trash. If you walk far enough, you run out of trail and get to walk by the edge of a highway to get up to the top of the little mountain. Up there, there's a nice view, the stinkiest zoo I've ever smelled, and a monument of Argentina war heroes.

Most people drive up there do to these conditions. I didn't enjoy our walk all that much, but we were walking with an irritating girl we had met at our hostel and she really, really didn't like it, so that made me kind of like it. I think it is likely that the other people we were with felt the same way.

The next day we rented a car in the afternoon and headed east towards the Andes. We had picked a lake with a few campgrounds around it about 2 hours out of Mendoza. It turns out that that lake really sucks. Not really the lake I guess, but the area around it.

The lake is a reservoir and they flooded a little town- Portorillos- when they made it. To compensate, they built this weird replacement town with new, adobe looking houses that look all the same. At some point, they must have run out of money because the roads in the little town were barely passable. Outside of this town were a couple really small towns on the way to the "campgrounds". The first campgrounds we went to were in the unacceptable category. There was one up the road 15 or so miles that sounded good in our guidebook. We drove all the way up this bad road and then down this washboard dirt road to a place in the bottom of a canyon where someone had a crappy house, wild pigs, some cement slabs, and a firepit or two and called it a campground.

So we ended up driving another hour or so to another little dirt town - Upsallata-




that was much less crappy. The campground was pretty shitty, but the site came with firewood. And it was dark and we were tired of driving. The campground also came with some gypsies that kept their light on all night camping nearby and some barking dogs. Argentina is #2 in the world (as far as I know) for wild barking dogs (American Samoa). But again, the dogs in Argentina aren't usually mean.


So the next day we headed up towards the Andes.


After a couple hours, we made it up to the base of Acongagua, the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas.




It takes 10 days to hike up to base camp from where we were and climb it. So we didn't do it. They had some exhibits about Naomi's favorite animal, the Miladon:



But we did drive up a really windy road:


The windy road takes you up to the pass between Chile and Argentina. It is really windy and cold up there.




Then we went to the Inca Bridge. There's a hot springs there too. Look cool?


I thought it would be, but it turns out it is one of the lamest tourist attractions in the world. The biggest problem is that it is mostly closed off. You can't get to the hot springs anymore. You can't get close to the "ruins" either. But, what you can get close to are piles of rocks for sale... and also elephants and camels made out of clay. Yipeee!


The cemetery for climbers killed on Aconcagua was cooler:


On our way back down to the east, a bunch of dark clouds formed where we were heading.




Did it rain? You'll have to wait until I update this blog again, which based on recent history, could be months.


Movie Review: Big Man Japan- 6
It is a weird, weird movie. A little slow sometimes, but has some cool, funny parts. Check it out.