May 8, 2008

We thought we had seen the most beautiful nature possible in the South-West USA, Patagonia (South-Argentina) and the Chilean Lake district with the volcano's. But the past week showed us "we ain't seen nothing yet"!

But first things first, we started in Mendoza, after a half-hour flight from Santiago in Chile. As soon as the pilot introduced himself and said what altitude we were flying, he also announced the descend. After arriving at the airport, we wanted to take a bus into the citycenter and we didn't believe a taxi-driver who said there were no buses, but would a taxi-driver ever say something different? After waiting for half an hour, we walked 1 km to the main road, where luckily a long-distance bus stopped to take us the last part to the centre.
Mendoza is the wine-capital of Argentina and so we visited again 2 wineries, as well as an old olive-oil factory. It's a very nice and beautiful city, but the hostels we stayed in weren't that nice. We changed to another one after 1 night, but that didn't improve things much. A lot of noise, music and smoke until 2 in the morning. However, so far we've been very lucky with our sleepingplaces and have stayed in the nicest and cosiest hostals.

What we enjoyed very much in Argentina next to the nature, is the culinary side. They have delicious steaks, the best wines and above all: wonderful icecream! And all that for a very nice price (best steak we have tasted: 6 Euro, a bottle of very good wine in a restaurant: 5 Euro!).

From Mendoza we took a night-bus north to Tucuman. We have had some good buses in Chile and earlier in Peru, but this one beat everything. The seats declined 180 degrees, so you can lie flat, you get a blanket and a pillow, they serve dinner and/or breakfast (in this case both), and this one even served free champagne and whiskey!! We had a good night sleep and arrived in Tucuman in the morning. There we rented a small car for a week to drive further north to Salta.
The first stop was Tafi del Valle, where we stayed in a very old estancia (=farm), full of atmosphere. We had dinner in the old dining-room, on a very long table, with silver cutlery. We felt like the owner himself! We did some horse riding and enjoyed the views when we drove around with the car. One night we had an interesting dinner with a typical emotional Italian who turned out to be an admirer of Baghwan and had been with him some time.
After Tafi, we visited several towns during the next 7 days. Cafayate is a town where they produce a special white wine: Torrontes, it tasted really good.

We were happy we hired a car because we were much more flexible in where to go and what to do then when taking buses. Even though driving in Argentina is a bit different than in Europe...
The car was a very basic Chevrolet; a small Corsa without a rear seat (much space for our backpacks), basic airconditioning: turn open the window, but this was necessairy anyway to adjust the mirrors. But it was very new (11.000km) and caused no problems on the rough gravelroads.
It's very easy to navigate through the centers of almost all the towns, since every town is built around a main square (usually called 'Plaza de Independencia', 'Plaza de Armas' or at least 'Plaza de something' ;). Most city centers have straight blocks of houses, so when looking at the map it looks like a perfect grid. The houses are always numbered in the same way (if they are numbered at all); the first block can range from 1 to ie. 180, where the numbers on the second block will start at 200, the next block at 300 etcetera. The one minor difficulty can be that a lot of streets are one-way streets. We still haven't found out who has the right-of-way when you approach a crossing, we think who has the most guts and takes the most risks (not us).
Less than 33 percent of the roads in Argentina is paved (asphalt), the rest is eather gravel (ripio) or sand. An asphalt road is not necessairily easier to drive. Sometimes a gravel road is much wider than an asphalted road, and you can drive up to 60 kmh on them. We also drove on very small asphalted roads up on a mountain, driving maximum 40 kmh on those, since they had a corner every 10 meters. Due to the lack of power-steering we've created some arm muscles on those roads! Some signs advice drivers to use the horn on every corner to warn oncoming traffic. The most amazing thing: even on the smallest, roughest roads, there are still large buses driving between the towns. It's the main form of travel in Argentina and they take you everywhere.

To end the story with what we started it with: the nature. For several days we drove through different "Quebrada's", also called "Bergkloof/vallei" in Dutch, "Gorge" in English and French or "Schlucht" in German. Spectacular colours, shapes, views, thousands of cactus, some lonely houses and churches, horses and cows and a lot of dust. The pictures and videos speak for themselves.

Below you find two movies about some gorges that we drove through.