So we made it to summer. After spending a month and a half in Patagonia and wondering where all the heat went, we packed up our cold-weather gear, shipped it back to the U.S., and took a hellacious long bus ride to San Rafael in Argentina’s scorching hot Mendoza Province. Google describes the Mendoza region as “semi-arid” to which I have to reply “Who are you kidding?” Granted it has rained a few times, but it’s so hot that all moisture bakes right off the ground and back into the air.
We also put my “We should have rented a car” hypothesis to the test – scientifically! We took two similar trips to canyons with lots of neat geology. One was by a tour company and the other was on our own via a rental car and self-determination. How’d it turn out? Let’s compare:
San Rafael – Atuel Canyon
The Atuel Canyon is a river gorge just south of San Rafael. It is dammed at several points for use as both a reservoir and hydrothermal power for the surrounding area. It’s also a popular spot for camping, kayaking, and white-water rafting (more on that in a bit).
We booked a day trip with a local company who picked us up at our hostel early Sunday morning. For some reason, we always end up being among the first on the bus, which lets us pick our seats but also means we get to wake up earlier and bump our way around town while the tour group picks up everyone else. After the whole crew is rounded up, the tour bus heads off along semi-paved roads for the head of the canyon, stopping along the way at an overlook at what I think was the highest point in the area – a hill with miles of featureless scrubland as far as the eye can see.
We took photos – or “fotitos” as our guide insisted on calling them – and, after wasting twenty minutes or so, got back on the road. Our next stop was a twenty minute layover at the dam for the reservoir – the “largest reservoir in Mendoza Province!” and then a short ride to lunch in the little village of Nihuil.
I’m going to go on record as stating that Nihuil is the ugliest little town in all of South America. It’s basically one restaurant that the tour groups dump people at, a bunch of shacks, and the Argentinian equivalent of a KOA campground. And we stayed there for an hour and a half. While most of our group made use of the restaurant, Lea and I had packed our own sandwiches. The heat was pretty oppressive, so I went looking for a tienda selling cold drinks. The few ramshackle shops I could locate had nothing to offer but beer and Red Bull. I’ve been in plenty of small, poor towns in the world, but this was the first one outside the U.S. where I was surprised I didn’t stumble across a meth lab.
It was well into the afternoon when we finally began the descent into the canyon proper. The Atuel Canyon is full of stunning features. It’s a smorgasbord for geologists. We’d asked the agency if the tour would stop for us to look at all the geological formations, and technically it did – we just couldn’t get out of the bus. Instead, we got to enjoy them through heavily tinted and scratched windows. The bus only stopped at a handful of pull-offs where the geology wasn’t the most fascinating but where people had set up tables of souvenirs.
The high point of the trip was when we reached the bottom of the gorge past all the hydroelectric plants and into the section of the river used by the general public. For a modest additional fee, we could throw on our swim trunks and go white-water rafting. “Ya pays your money and ya takes yer chances,” a wise man once said. We did.
Unfortunately we don’t have any pictures to record this event. I wish I’d had a camera if only to capture the look on our rafting guide’s face when we told him I only spoke English. He sent us to another guide for basic paddling instructions – “adelante” for forward, “atrás” for back, and “alto” for stop. Combined with “derecha” for right and “izquierda” for left, I had all the Spanish I’d need to follow orders. And off we went.
These were lowly Class II rapids in the stretch of water we braved, but I’m pretty sure our captain steered us into a few of them at an angle designed for maximum turbulence. I nearly got thrown out of the boat twice and one other person actually did get ejected. She seemed to enjoy it a lot more than I would have. We passed many campgrounds full of bemused bystanders who I’m sure were laughing at us and thinking “There but for the grace of God go I.” I enjoyed the experience enough that I’ll happily do it again, though I’d be more comfortable if I actually spoke the same language as my steersman.
That would have been a perfect end to the day – except it wasn’t. Instead of taking us back to San Rafael, our tour insisted on tacking on one more stop, this to a farm where they dry fruit, make preserves, and bottle wine. Frankly at that part of the day I couldn’t have cared less. I just wandered around with the group, tried to look like I was interested, and marked time until the ride to our apartment. We were very, very late getting back.
San Agustín – Ischigualasto Provincial Park
Just a few hours up the road from San Rafael is the city of Mendoza itself. We stayed one night, picked up a Chevrolet Joy from Cactus Rent-a-Car, and after a brief struggle trying to figure out how to lock the doors we were on our way. It was a five hour drive through trackless arid scrubland to the village of San Agustín del Valle Fértil, but by doing it on our own we could stop for a break whenever we wanted, control our own air conditioning, and have actual elbow room. We also got to create our own side-trip by pulling off at the shrine to Difunta Correa, an unofficial but popular Argentinian saint.
The legend is that the Difunta Correa was a woman whose husband was drafted into the Argentinian army and later became ill. His wife took their baby and tried to find her husband but died in the wild when her supplies ran out. Her body was found days later with her still-living infant miraculously nursing at her breast. There are roadside shrines to her all over the country, but the site of her burial outside of San Juan is the mother-load of all roadside shrines. People leave her bottles of water, snacks, and other supplies she could have used in the desert in 1840.
It was also insanely hot. After hours and hours of driving on our own, we made it to San Agustín, checked in to our hotel, and ate goat. The next day we drove another hour north to Ischigualasto Park, where instead of riding with a tour group you take your own car in a caravan led by a park ranger. We stopped at sites of actual geological interest, including the site of a dinosaur dig, and made our own way out at our own pace and speed. After a brief stop at a YPF station for lunch, we were on our way back to Mendoza.
An aside here about YPF Stations: YPF is the main gas station chain in Argentina, and we’ve come to appreciate them as a company even though we haven’t been using them for gas. They consistently have comfortable, air-conditioned cafes when nothing else is open and we need a place to sit down and relax. In our layover in Comodoro Rivadavia, our day walking around Bariloche, and in Mendoza itself, the local YPF proved a comfortable refuge from the conditions outside.
Renting a car ended up being a lot more work on our end, what with driving a ten hour round trip, but it gave us freedom and comfort that we’ve never had with packaged day tours. In hindsight, after the way our next few days in Mendoza went, we should’ve kept the car for longer.
Us v. Argentina: The Saga Continues
We originally considered skipping Mendoza, but someone we talked to convinced us otherwise. We should have gone with our original instinct. Mendoza is the heart of Argentina’s wine country but the city itself is blazing hot with little to offer.
Plus, it was hard on us to come straight to this region from frigid Patagonia with no transition in-between. It would have helped if more places in Mendoza had functioning A/C, but… It was okay where we stayed the first night and at our hotel in San Agustin, but when we came back to Mendoza we got a room in an older hotel with tiny, tiny A/C units that simply weren’t up to the task. In our first room, it barely worked at all – we ended up moving the bed across so that what little air there was blew directly on us. We had the hotel move us to a different room the next day, which was better, but even there the A/C unit would freeze up and die if we ran it for more than a few hours at a time.
Despite our reluctance to come back to a hot room, we just had to leave the poor machine turned off to recover while we ambled around town looking for places to eat and other things to do. In this, also, Mendoza frustrated us. While the hotel was waiting for our new room to be ready, we took our car back and decided to walk to a few art museums. Both that we wanted to go to were closed for renovation. The next day we wanted to find a vegetarian restaurant for lunch and go to the science museum. It took us about twelve blocks to find a restaurant that was actually open, and the bus line to the science museum didn’t seem to run on Saturday. We made it, but only after sweating our weight in bottled water.
On Sunday we wanted to drink ourselves silly in Mendoza’s wine district before hopping on our night bus to Córdoba, but the company that runs the hop-on hop-off wine tasting buses closed before we got to their one office on Saturday, so we opted to make our own way to the Kaiken Bodega via the cost-effective municipal bus system, RedBus.
Brothers and Sisters, let me tell you about RedBus.
With the exception of Santiago, all the city bus systems we used on the West Coast were cash-based. In Argentina, the buses run on card systems like many metro systems in the U.S. The card system used in Mendoza is called RedBus. There is a RedBus kiosk at the main bus station so we bought a card (after a brief skirmish with people cutting in line ahead of us) and made a wild guess as to how much money we would need to load on it.
Our guess was spot-on. When we got back to the bus terminal with our luggage on Sunday morning, there were only 6 pesos left on the card – 1/3 of a ride. We stashed our bags at luggage storage then went looking for a place to load enough money on the card to get us to the winery and back.
So of course, the RedBus kiosk at the main bus station was closed. Apparently it’s only open from Monday – Friday from 8:30 to 4:30. Why would it need to be open more than that? After a few well-directed words of frustration we moved on to plan B – add money to the card at a kiosk somewhere in town. We’d seen several convenience stores in central Mendoza with “Carga RedBus” signs, we just needed to find one somewhere near our bus route. The RedBus website has a map of vendors, but it turns out that map is hopelessly out of date.
To make it worse, on a Sunday only about a fifth of the shops are open at all. We wandered several streets in the climbing heat asking at every place we came to if we could charge our RedBus card. Even at the shops with “Carga RedBus” signs, however, the answer was No.
It turns out that on Sunday, in all of southeastern Mendoza, there is one guy with a stall on Rioja and Catamarca who, beginning at 12:30, will Carga RedBus. We loaded 300 pesos on the card just in time to catch the 700 for a fifty minute ride south to Luján de Cuyo, a.k.a. Wine Central. From there Google suggested there was another bus that would take us to the Kaiken winery, but we got sick of waiting for it and grabbed a taxi instead. We got to the winery just after 2:00 p.m. We asked the taxi to pick us up when they closed at 5:00.
Why Kaiken? We’d picked up a bottle of their Malbec in Punta Arenas, Chile, and loved it – but strangely, could never find it in stores in Argentina. It turns out that the owner of the winery is Chilean himself and that Kaiken exports 90% of their wines outside the country. We knocked on the door, told the guard that no, we didn’t have a reservation, then signed up for the Four-Wine tasting… and added two more wines to the list, then bought a bottle of their Merlot all for our very own and drank it at a picnic table under a tree on the premises.
¿Vale la pena? It’s a close call, but yes – drinking for three hours in the shade on a hot Sunday afternoon at the Kaiken Bodega was well worth the effort of getting there.
Too bad our cab never showed up. Lea walked (I staggered) out of the bodega just before five, but our taxi never came. In hopes of finding a bus, we started the long, hot trek down the gravel road back toward Luján de Cuyo. We stopped at paradas in the hopes that a bus or taxi would pass us on the way, but no – we ended up walking four kilometers to get back to the bus stop where we were just in time to catch the express back to Mendoza.
(We didn’t realize how far it was until I looked it up on Google Maps just now – we only knew that it was hot and it took forever.)
So that’s my tale, O Dwellers of the Frozen North. (Seriously, I see that Atlanta is closing down for snow?) We sweltered for a few more hours and took the 10:00 night bus to Córdoba. The bus, my friends, was air-conditioned.
P.S. My Book-of-the-Country for Argentina
My pick for Argentina was Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. This is the first of my selections from my “Reading Around South America” project that I can’t honestly recommend. A few of his stories, yes – most of them, no. Borges was a 20th Century Argentinian literary icon, but his style is too remote and didactic to be enjoyable. Many of his plots are nonexistent, and others are just thin frameworks to hang long-winded philosophical treatises on. One of his favorite tricks is to write literary criticism on authors who never existed. Much of the time I had the feeling that he was making some sort of clever joke that, not being one of the Argentinian intelligentsia from the 1940s, I just couldn’t get.
Of Borges’s stories, I would recommend “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which introduced me to Borges in The Big Book of Science Fiction and is included here, as well as “The Library of Babel,” “The Secret Miracle,” and “Three Versions of Judas.” My full review is over at Goodreads.
In San Rafael there is actually a hedge-labyrinth designed in Borges’s honor that you can visit and get lost in. (Labyrinths feature prominently in a lot of the author’s work.) We thought about going there, but in the end it was more important that we take a day off. We’re never going to see everything in South America, and Borges is never going to be one of my favorite authors.