Mendoza

I'd like to begin this with the disclaimer that it was written on Microsoft word in Spanish, so my writing was a constant battle against Spanish auto-correct. That explains any randomly capitalized, misspelled, or Spanish-ized words.

Our trip took the full loop around the Northern half of the country, from the Chilean border to Brazil. We started out in Córdoba headed overnight to Mendoza, where we saw several vineyards, but that really doesn’t interest me that much, as the wine making process strikes me as rather disappointing. There is no stomping on grapes or dark cellars, but rather big industrial steel vats and wine being transferred through hoses that look like they’re from a fire truck. Our second day in the province, though, we spent an entire day making a two way bus tour to the Chilean border, passing through a region known as ‘Alta Montaña,’ as the main route passes within sight of Aconcagua, the highest Peak in the western hemisphere, which ranks a disappointing 34th with highest peaks in the world, yet it is the tallest Peak in the World outsider of the Himalayas. The Himalayas must be awful tall… We made it up that day to around 3400 meters, at which it starts getting a bit difficult to breathe, and climbing large hills becomes quite a task. 

Standing before Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the west.

That region marked the southernmost reach of the Incas as a race, not really as an empire, so the small Incan ruins that we saw had been built by ethnic Inca but without the grandeur that the Incan empire is known for. Although, the specific pass that we took though the mountains is known to have been used as a passage for Incan messengers who traveled thousands of kilometers on foot to carry messages throughout the continent.

Mendoza, which sits about half way down the north-south axis of Argentina, is well enough into the south that it gets decently cold during the winter, and a bit too cold in the mountains during the fall. I learned that. Thus, we made our way north in search of Warmer weather (there were actually other motives behind that move), and passed through some serious desert in San Juan and La Rioja provinces. Some towns that we passed through struck me as what Northern Mexico must look like, which is odd, since I’m thousands of kilometers from home speculating what the Earth must look like just a quick skip from my house. We stopped for the night at a small hotel in the middle of nowhere that fell right in the early evening shadow of the huge, dry, and rocky Andes Mountains set right in front of a green and yellow shrubby prairie one would expect to find in Wyoming.