Mendoza (3-5 feb)

I love Mendoza!  It is so hot here, and the city is so pretty!  Even though it's in the middle of the desert, the Huarpes built this irrigation system throughout the whole city before the Spanish arrived, with trenches running between all the sidewalks and roads.  This has allowed the city to be super green, with trees lining all the streets and the plethora of plazas.  I got there on a Sunday morning, and it was like a ghost town.  The Museum of Modern Art was like the only thing that was open, so I went there, and it was nice, but super tiny.  There were only 3 Mendocinos being exhibited, but the building was underneath the middle of the Plaza Independencia which was cool.  I also checked out the artisan fair in the main square, but it was really bizarre--it started at like 8pm and went to 2am.

Plaza Independencia

Yesterday I went on a tour of the Bodegas, and it was so much fun!  Luke, this guy I met at the hostel, and I rented a tandem bike and took it through wine country to try all the different wines.  Some of them were sooo good!  But it was so hot, that none of the whites or rosés were chilled enough, so we mostly stuck to the reds.  Besides, Mendoza is known for it's Malbec, so we had a lot of that.  We started at Trapiche, which is apparently a famous one internationally, and is the oldest in the region.  They gave us a tour where we got to see where the grapes get crushed, and the barrelling process, and learned about how they designed the architecture to control the temperature for the grapes inside without air-con.  We met a British couple there and teamed up with them to visit the rest of the Bodegas.

Luke stealing some delicious grapes roadside.

The next one we went to was Mevi, and the grounds were BEAUTIFUL!  They had such a nice terrasse for the wine tasting, and they were a lot more generous with the portions than Trapiche.  They had a really good Malbec.  We then did a tasting at Tempus Albi where we had lunch, and they also had such a nice patio overlooking the vineyards.  After lunch we went to Familia de Tommaso, which had a really nice dessert wine.  I forget the name of the one we ended at, but it was really small, and the garden was super cute, but I wasn't a huge fan of their Malbec.  I ended up running into an Aussie who had been at my hostel in Santiago which was super cool.

Barrels of wine at Trapiche

Once we got back to the hostel, it was only a couple hours until their Asado!  They eat soooo much meat here.  And their salads only ever have 2 ingredients: lechuga y tomatoes.  The asado was good, but there was a lot of fat on the meat which was kind of disgusting.  And meat is really hard to cut, especially when you're trying to get the gross fat parts off and the meat is too soft to like stay in place when you're trying to cut.  The food here though is sooo much better than Chile.  Their empanadas are like ten times better, AND I found Tropicana in the grocery store!!!  I have been missing sugar-free juice for the past like 2 months, it's so exciting to be able to buy real juice again!

Biking through Mevi

They take their siestas really seriously here.  I was wondering about the city today and at 1pm EVERYTHING shut down.  Like the city dies.  Shops reopen at 5 and stay open til 9.  And then you eat dinner at like 11 pm.  There was a pub crawl starting at my hostel last night, and they guys didn't even end up leaving until 2 am!  The hostel has a hammock though covered by the trees, so it's the perfect place to take a nap, when everything is closed.

Wine country (Maipu)

I'm hopping on a bus to BA tonight, and I'm super stoked!  And then on the weekend I head to Rio for Carnival!!

A missed bus, a car crash, and my first encounter with the Chilean healthcare system

January 26 was definitely the most hectic and dramatic day I have had on my trip so far.

I had a bus from Ushuaia to Punta Arenas that left at 7 am. Naturally, I had stayed up late drinking with the Aussie and French guys after the Asado, so I was extremely hungover and functioning off about 2 and a half hours sleep when I departed for the bus terminal. I got there at 6:30, and when the bus got there I tried to board it but the driver told me that he could not accept my ticket, as it was a “voucher” and not actually a ticket. I had bought the voucher from a travel agency in Puerto Natales, and apparently I had to have traded my voucher for a ticket beforehand at the bus office. The bus “terminal” in Ushuaia was a parking lot with no ticket offices, so essentially I would have to walk across town with my giant pack to an office that didn't open until 9 am, to get the ticket that I had already paid for for the bus that would already be gone at that point. I was really unimpressed. And dealing with this bureaucratic BS in a foreign language while that tired and hungover was really not fun. So I missed my bus and somehow had to get to Punta Arenas before my flight left the following evening. I went to the ticket office when it finally did open, only to be told that the local ticket office didn't have any ties to the PN travel agency I had bought my ticket from, and that I had to have traded my voucher for a ticket in Puerto Natales, not in Ushuaia. And if I wanted a refund, I would have to contact the travel agency directly. But I bought my ticket with cash, and I wasn't going back to PN, so there was no way I was getting my money back.

So then I go around to a few different travel agencies in town (because you can't buy tickets from the bus companies...wtf! You have to buy them from travel agencies), and none of them had a bus that would get me to Punta Arenas in time for my flight. So at this point I'm thinking I've pretty much lost $150 on a missed bus and what will be a missed flight, so I head back to the hostel to see if any of the staff there can be more helpful to me than the other people I'd encountered so far that morning. As I start to relay my story to the friendly girl at the desk, she mentions to me that 4 people from BA are driving to Punta Arenas today! So I asked them if they had any room, and they did, and they agreed to take me! By 10:30 am my day was already starting to look up.

They were super friendly—all my age, on holiday from uni, doing a roadtrip all the way down to Patagonia and back up Argentina to BA again. We ended up stopping in Tolhuin to go to the “world's best bakery.” I have to admit, I was sceptical at first, but that place was fucking delicious! And my new friends knew someone who worked there, so we got to go into the back and see where they made all the delicious baked goods, and the kitchen was HUGE! I had the best empanadas I have ever had in my life. And then back in the car they broke out the Maté. Maté is an Argentine herbal drink that every single person in Argentine society drinks. It's a communal drink where you put herbs into a cup, add hot water, and then sip through a metal straw with a filter at the bottom. Once you finish the water in it, you refill it up and pass it to the next person to enjoy. It's quite bitter, but it was good! The Porteños had also bought some croissants at the bakery and informed me that I was now having the most typical argentine breakfast—sweet croissants with Maté.

The next couple hours I had a nap, watched a movie, and then we got to the border and as we were getting out of the car, my flipflop broke. So I had to walk into the Argentine exit office barefoot holding my flipflop in one hand, getting a lot of strange looks. We ended up finding some packing tape in the car, so I “fixed” my flipflop, and by the time we had driven to the next border control to enter Chile, I was walking in sandals held together with tape. I think I got just as many strange looks.

About an hour from the border control we were driving on a really windy stretch and suddenly one of the tires popped. We were on an unpaved road, and the driver as a result started swerving uncontrollably. Suddenly she just completely lost control and the car started to roll. I was sitting behind the driver, and the car rolled to the left, slamming my shoulder and head into the window. After a full rotation though, the car landed on it's wheels again, and luckily no one was seriously injured. We all had our seatbelts on, which I'm sure saved us from smashing our heads on the ceiling and breaking our necks. We were in a complete state of shock; I was just sitting there after it happened shaking. The car was totalled—all the windows were smashed out, and the passenger door wouldn't close anymore, but it could still run. Although we were in a no cell zone, we were on the main road between the border and the ferry to leave Tierra del Fuego, and within minutes about 3 cars had passed by and stopped to help us.

The Argentines stayed at the scene and decided to go back to border control to get help and get it towed. One of the cars that passed by to help, however, was heading to Punta Arenas, and offered to drive me there so that I could still catch my flight the next day. Once I got to Punta Arenas I went to the hospital and they gave me a bunch of tests and everything came back normal. I was really impressed with the Chilean healthcare system—aside from the exorbitant costs (a few hours in there with a CT scan, Xray, and some pain drugs was about $700!), I was seen faster than I ever have been in a hospital back home. There was no one in the waiting rooms, and I had to wait less than an hour to get the tests done, and then less than another hour for the results. And this is all in a tiny town in Patagonia. And there were even a couple lab techs who spoke English. I also talked to the guys from BA, and they were all fine as well. Just really shaken. We were super lucky that no one was hurt badly, but it was really terrifying looking out the front of the window and seeing and feeling the car start to flip over.

I flew back to Santiago Saturday night, and after I told my parents what had happened, my mom got on a flight and came and met me in Santiago.  She had an offer from some friends to come stay at their country house outside the city, so after a couple days of rest in Santiago, we went out there, and it was GORGEOUS!  It is an old castle, with huge grounds, and a pool, and flowers and other plants all surrounding the house.  And it overlooked a river, so the sound of it could be heard from our bedroom. It was so nice and relaxing, and the son of the people who owned the place was there and makes sculptures and furniture, and his work was all over the house.  I was just mellowing out on painkillers most of the time I was there, and didn't think to take any pictures, but it was so nice and beautifully decorated, with an amazing view.

Me and my mom are back in the city now, and after a day of exploring, I'll be hopping on a bus to Argentina tomorrow, which will hopefully be less eventful than my transportation down in Patagonia.  Spending so much time here doing nothing has cut into my Argentina time, but I'm super stoked for wine tasting in Mendoza!