Adventuring with Herbert Putkey

Our final stop on the trip. We took a bus through the Andes to Santiago from Mendoza. On the way, we went past Acongaua, the highest mountain in the Americas. Unfortunately we couldn’t figure out how to get on a bus that would stop in the park and let us hike around a bit before moving on, but we did manage to get a picture of the mountain from the moving bus! We also had a ridiculous 3.5 hour delay at the border, even though there really weren’t that many people in front of us. We only had 2 days in Santiago, so we basically just walked around the city as much as we could. We went to the pre-Columbian museum, and up Santa Lucia park, and Cerro Cristobal for the views…which showed how much smog there was around. For me, Santa Lucia park was the highlight - I thought that it would be a grassy hill, but it actually had series of stairs, fountains, and buildings built into it.

Santiago is also famous for its Lapis Lazuli, a blue stone found only in a few places on earth. Theresa really likes it, so she bought a necklace there.

The pictures from Santiago are up here.

We had 4 nights in Mendoza, which is the longest of anywhere on the trip. The city has big tall trees lining all the streets and was quite nice. Unfortunately they had gotten as much rain in the previous week as they normally get in a year, so it was a lot wetter than we were expecting! Mendoza is Argentina’s wine region, so we went on a bikes and wines tour which was pretty good, although the bikes were terrible. We also went on a rafting trip that was a lot of fun. Other than that, it was the usual exploring and eating. Whenever it wasn’t raining there were a lot of people out in the streets and plazas - I think it was our favourite city on the trip.

As usual, some of our Mendoza pictures on our picasa page.

A reserve just south of Mendoza, Payunia has the densest concentration of volcanoes on the planet.

After the lake district, we went north towards Mendoza. After a night in Malargue, we went on to stay at Kine, a eco-turism place on actually inside the reserve. We didn’t know what to expect - we thought it would be some sort of small town, but it was actually just a single family home. It was miles from anywhere! On the way in, the road had been washed out and a truck was stuck. It took a couple of hours for them to get through. Since the road went through a dried river bed, we think it must get washed out every time it rains, with is just about every day during the summer.

We went horseback riding and had a couple good walks. It was spectacular scenery all around - red rocks, guanacos, volcanos. On the way out, we joined a tour of the volcano circuit. It was hard being squeezed onto a minibus with 15 people after a few days with the whole world to ourselves. The black barren landscapes around the volcanoes were really impressive, though.

All our pictures are here.

We flew from Buenos Aires to Bariloche, which is the centre of the lake district turism. We did a half day kayak trip on Lago Gutierrez as part of a group, and then a 2 day trip with camping on Lago Mascardi which was just Theresa and I and our guide Joe. After that we took the teleferico up to the top of Cerro Otto, and then did a short hike to some different viewpoints around the mountain. The next stop was Junin de los Andes at the north end of the lake district. We took a bus along the famed Ruta de los siete lagos to get there. Junin is a much quieter town with much less tourism and we both really liked it. Our main purpose in going there was to explore the Lanin national park, so we did a day hike to the base of Volcan Lanin, that had spectacular scenery.

Some of the pictures are here.

A lot of things on the Argentina trip made me laugh, mostly because I had expectations and they were totally not correct. A lot of times they were the expectations of someone with a high standard of living, so I was partly laughing at the situation and partly laughing at myself.

In many towns, people don’t have cars. Instead they ride bikes. Having seen these bikes and that they’re not locked up, I knew that the bikes in the country weren’t very nice. I also knew that there’s a 100% import tax so most people cannot afford nice, imported bikes.

Both our guidebooks recommended Bikesandwines.com, a company that offers wine country tours with a bike rental. They’re advertising and website looked great and they listed a lot of great things included with the price of their tour: gatorade or water, bike rental, panniers, a guided tour in spanish or english, a cruiser or mountain bike, a helmet, reservations at the wineries with exclusive bike parking. And we paid extra for the transfer to and from the bike rental place.

We were ready at 9:30 for our ride. At 10:15, the ride still hadn’t shown up, so the reception at our hostel called, the ride comes 20 minutes later, we’re on our way. Did they forget about us? You bet!

We get to the bike rental place and the bikes are practically junk. If you were a poor kid without a bike and someone gave you one of these bikes, it would be a great deal, the best bike in the world. But we were paying customers and a bike with a broken wheel isn’t easy to ride. There goes my North American expectations - getting in the way.

And the rest of it goes:

• We were supposed to get a bottle of water each. Can we have it? Sure
• We were supposed to get panniers. Can we have them? Sure.
• There was supposed to be a guided tour. Yes, it’s this map. That’s your guide.
• Where do we go for lunch? Here, and it costs $35 pesos. How come we have to pay for lunch when we’ve already paid you $110 pesos? Because you didn’t pay for lunch. We didn’t pay for lunch? No. Yes, we did. Oh. Here’s your voucher.
• (Don’t bother to ask about the helmet…)

We set off for the first winery but we can’t get the seat to stay still. We stop to adjust that. While we’re stopped, I notice that my pedal is broken. Oh well, it still works. (It got progressively worse through the ride.) Chris can’t put the balls of his feet on the pedals, otherwise his heels hit the panniers. He rides with his heels on the pedals instead of the balls of his feet. My seat really hurt my crotch because it was convex, pushing up into me instead of giving me some “breathing room,” so to speak.
We take a tour at the first winery and then get to taste their “winery only, we don’t sell this one it’s so special” wine. In other words, things didn’t quite work out so we can’t sell it!

The next place is a deli where we are escorted on the grounds to a table and are given a set menu: a big chunk of steak with a salad. We wait about 45 minutes for the meal to come and it’s cooked well done. Argentines cook things to well done and don’t ask how you’d like it. We didn’t give a tip and we left early, not staying for the tour.

The next winery we want to get a flight of wine for $15 pesos, but are told we can’t share the $15 peso flight. The $15 peso flight is not for sharing, but you can share the $20 peso flight. I wanted to ask if it was physically impossible to share the $15 flight or if the winery just didn’t want us to share…

The next one, Vino de la Cera was great. Small, friendly, the guy spoke spanish to us even though he spoke very good english. We bought two bottles and had a nice time.

After that, we went to a chocolate manufacturer and bought some Irish/Mendoza whiskey and dulce de leche con chocolate, then we cycled back, sat on bean bags for 20 minutes waiting for our ride, and returned to Mendoza 3 bottles of alcohol heavier.

While in Argentina, Chris and I went to this “puesto” called Kine. A puesto is like a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. It’s got some trees around it to say “hey! we’re here!” in the otherwise barren, treeless landscape. The family we stayed with didn’t speak English and offered food, lodging, and activities at their puesto. We stayed there for three nights.

To get there, we took a “cuatro por cuatro” (a 4×4) in the morning. There had been a huge thunderstorm the night before and the road was washed out. A Toyota 4×4 had gotten stuck in the mud and we waited for 1.5 hours for the tracker to pull the Toyota out and compact the mud so we could drive through.

We arrived at Kine and it was somewhat awkward. The family didn’t introduce themselves but they did offer us coffee and bread with jam. That was at 3:30. Dinner wasn’t until 9pm, so we were left to entertain ourselves. Luckily, the daughter, a 16 year old, entertained us and we played cards with her. She didn’t speak english so we practiced our spanish. She didn’t want to practice her english with us.

The next day, we went on a horseback ride through the ranch. We saw a lot of wild guanacos as well as “el bano” of the guanaco. There were also cows, horses, chinchillas (wild). We rode for about 2.5 hours to the asado pit where Aldo, the dad, was cooking a freshly killed baby sheep. It was 3kg of meet on a cast iron stick, cooking over hot coals. It took about 20 minutes to cook the sheep and then I ate about 1kg of the meat. This was, quite possibly, the BEST meat I’ve EVER eaten. There was no additives - just all baby lamb - and it was salty and juicy and unbelievable. I decided then that North Americans do not know how to cook lamb. Why taint it with sauces when it already tastes like heaven? In the best spanish I could, I told Aldo that this was simply the best meat I’ve ever eaten.
During lunch, a storm was moving in, as usually happens in the afternoons in Payunia. It wasn’t raining over our lunch area, but maybe 2 km to the west we saw clouds moving in. At one point we saw a funnel cloud. It was the first time the daughter, Roxana, had seen a funnel cloud in that area! We finished with lunch and packed up everything, got back on the horses and started riding back. It started raining on us, so Roxana led us back to the truck. Then it started hailing harder and harder. We jumped into the truck and the hail came down like I’ve never seen! It hailed for about 10 minutes, the horses standing in the field getting struck. There was thunder and lightening and at one point there was a lightening strike in front of the truck, so close, maybe 250 meters, and there was NO gap between seeing the lightening and hearing the thunder. That was pretty scary!

After 20 minutes, the thunder, lightening and hail passed, leaving just rain. We got back on the horses and made our way back to the puesto. Chris and I are not great horse riders but the two horses we rode only wanted to be next to each other. They would always walk together no matter what we told them to do. At one point, Chris’ horse decided it didn’t want Chris up there anymore and it laid down on the field, sending Chris over to the side with his foot stuck. The horse felt the foot and quickly stood up. I was worried for Chris after this, but it was a good laugh.

We returned at about 5pm, read our books, took a shower, and had dinner at 9pm. The mother made flan, the best flan I’ve ever tasted in my life. Man, that was good day of food, possibly the best ever.

The Kine website: http://www.kinie.com.ar/

While in Argentina, Chris and I got to practice our spanish A LOT. It seemed that a lot of people didn’t know English, which was fine, but when we’ve traveled we’ve always found that more people know English than we expect. On this trip, fewer people knew English than we expected.

In Buenos Aires, we stayed at the Hilton and everyone spoke English - everyone!

In Bariloche, not a lot of people spoke English.

In Junin de los Andes, no one spoke English. We tried to get some toasted sandwiches untoasted and to go, but the waiter did not understand what we were saying. We ended up getting toasted sandwiches to eat in house and had to ask for them to go. We wanted to take our sandwiches on our hiking trip the next day, but the toasted sandwiches didn’t last. After we got them, we had them for dinner and they were soggy by the time we ate them (about 30 minutes after they were toasted).
In Kine, outside of Malargue, the family we stayed with didn’t speak any English. We spoke a lot of Spanish for three days and were feeling quite confident in our skills. At the end of the three days, we got onto a tour bus and everyone spoke Spanish, but we couldn’t understand them! The guide spoke only a bit of English and was asking everyone where they came from, where they had been in Argentina. Of 15 people in the group, Chris and I were the two of four people who couldn’t speak much Spanish. It made us nervous.

In Mendoza, a lot of people spoke English.

In Santiago, a lot of people spoke English. By the time we made it to Santiago, I couldn’t understand Spanish anymore. I was so used to the Castillano accent in Argentina that I couldn’t understand the Chilean Spanish. We went to one restaurant where the waiter had a severe under bite, so it was quiet difficult to understand him.

I just read an email from Kine, asking how our trip was and I could understand it. Before the trip, I struggled to decipher the emails. At least now I know a few more words!

Let’s get this out of the way: Out of all the places I’ve been, Argentina was the most culturally-shocking of all.
The things I did not like about Argentina:

• No toilet paper: In almost every bathroom, there’s no toilet paper. There’s either an attendant who takes money and gives you some toilet paper, or there’s no toilet paper, no paper towels. In one location, I made some purchases and wanted to use the bathroom, but I still needed to pay to pass through the immaterial gate. A young man, totally bored, sitting at a booth collecting pesos. Was the bathroom clean? No. But I did get toilet paper.
• Not on time: So many times we waited and waited and waited… and waited. We waited for a broken down bus, we waited for a ride after a siesta, waited for a trip to start, the guide to show up. It was like watching glass move. Oh I was so frustrated! We signed up for a half day river rafting trip, but it was actually a full day. Why? Because we finished with the trip at 12:30 but had to wait till 4pm to get a ride back to town? Why? Because the van didn’t leave till 4. Why? I don’t know. There were at least 4 drivers with about 30 people waiting, but the first van that could hold 10 people didn’t leave till 4. My only explanation: we couldn’t drive back during siesta time. So we sat for 3 hours and watched the drivers play pool and ping pong. The drivers could have taken us back, then had the rest of the day off, but instead they played ping pong.
• Garbage garbage everywhere: Argentina has a huge problem with garbage. I went there with this mystic of Patagonia, only to find that the people who live there don’t seem to feel the same respect for it that I do. There was so much life in those lakes and mountains and valleys, so many different plants, birds, insects. And then there’s so much garbage. When you’re on a trail, that’s where you find a lot of toilet paper. You have to use toilet paper and then leave it on the trail. In the cities, people just throw whatever trash they have on the ground. Adults and children: got an ice cream wrapper: use the ground; got an empty coke bottle, throw it on the ground. The river and lake shores collected the trash. I was shocked.
• A lot of people in Argentina were underemployed. We talked to a guy in the laundromat who said it’s quite difficult to find a job, not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still hard. There are a lot of extra people sitting around, a two person job is a four person job.
• Almost every woman of child bearing years was either pregnant or had 1-2 children or had children and was pregnant. As Chris told me, it must be cultural thing to have children, but I couldn’t believe that so many women had so many children. We talked to one woman who was in school to become a translator, but then she got married and pregnant and couldn’t continue with that. I felt that what was the point of her going to translator school if she’s just going to get married, have children, and stop with school? Just because you have children doesn’t mean you have to give up what you love. I wanted to ask so many women: are you happy with your children? Are you happy because you’re supposed to be or because you really truly enjoy taking care of children? If you had to do it again, would you? I know this is my value that I’m imposing on others, but I still wanted to ask…

And now we can move on to the real stories…

We arrived in Bariloche yesterday. It´s definitely a beautiful setting, on the edge of a lake surounded by mountains. It´s also definitely full of Argentinians on holiday.

We were supposed to start our 3 days of kayaking today. Unfortunately there was a bit of a mix up, and the local tour group here thought we were only arriving today, so no one met us at the hotel, and no one picked us up this morning. We spent about half a day sorting things out - i talked to 3 different people and got three different stories. Anyway, we are going to do a 2 day kayak trip starting tomorrow with just me and theresa and the guide (who is from America). We also had a half day trip today with a big group on a different lake, and the tour company is paying for our hotel tonight. We´ll have to talk to GAP adventures when we get back.

We´re trying to plan the part of the trip from the Lake District in the south to the Mendoza region where they make wine a bit further north. It seems quite complicated and it looks like we need to take 3 different buses over about 24 hours. We´ll see how that works out!

We arrived yesterday at about 1pm and checked-in to the hotel. We’re staying at a Hilton in the revamped port are because i have so many hilton points. As a diamond vip, we’ve been upgraded to the top floor of the hotel, and have access to the executive lounge - we’re just waiting for the cocktails to start being served in about 5 minutes! Tonight we’re going to see a Tango show - hopefully there won’t be any audience participation, or Theresa will be dragging me up there for sure!

So far we’ve done a lot of walking around, and not too much else. We made it to the San Telmo Sunday market yesterday, and walked around Palermo today. We saw the famous pink house yesterday where various politicians, including Evita Perron, have appealed to the public. Theresa didn’t get up on to the balcony, however.

I’d better go and get my free drink(s).

Update: We’re back now, and I’ve uploaded the Buenos Aires pictures here.