Mendoza: The Andes with a Little Vino Tinto

The bus trip to Mendoza was easy and comfortable. Jeremy and I reclined in large leather seats and were served whiskey and steak while watching a western movie. When I woke up in the morning and groggily looked out my window my decision to leave the city was reaffirmed. Rows and rows of grapes went on forever and in the distane the giant snowcapped peaks of the second highest mountain range in the world, the Andes, erupted from the plains. Jeremy and I knew that we had to get into those mountains immediately.

The first day in Mendoza was spent rushing around and trying to get our backpacking gear and a ride organized. The hostel we stayed in, Itaka, was hot and crowded but the staff was great and we found time during the day to kick it and go for a swim in the small pool in the backyard. The next morning we caught a nine a.m. van out to the mountains which passed by some beautiful scenery. We drove through vineyards until we entered a desert that resembled the American southwest. The rocks are all red here, with cliffs showing the sedimentary layering of thousands of years of dry rock. The vegetation is all small with a few cacti poking out of the ground.

We took a long dirt road, full of switchbacks, up into the mountains and were dropped off at the Refugio San Antonio in the Vallecitos region. One of the guides who worked for the bus company, Laurena asked us what we were doing and if she could accompany us for a while on our hike. We also met a wonderfully eccentric Canadian man named Rafael who wanted to come along for a short gaunt. Rafael hails from British Columbia and gesticulates everything he says. He had just bought 30,000 dollars worth of land down the road from the refugio and wanted to walk around and check everything out. After hiking for about and hour and a half with our new friends, Laurena gave us some great advice about where to camp and where to hike the next day. The counsel was much needed and very welcomed by Jeremy and I. Since I have been in South America I have received wonderful and helpful advice from complete strangers that has really added to my experiences. I have no doubt that much of the success of this trip can be attributed to other´s sense of charity.

We left our friends and started hiking up into a glacial moraine. After a few hours we were convinced that it was getting late so we set up camp in this green valley. Our spot was beautiful with great views, flat ground, and a flowing snow melt stream right near by. As we were setting up camp we saw wild horses on a ridge next to us and huanacos (llamas) grazing near the stream. On the other side of our tent was a steep, rocky face leading up to impressive snow covered peaks. Most of the time our surroundings were sheilded from view by the thick clouds that rolled in from the valley but sometimes we would get openings that revieled the incredible faces of the Andes. We were camped at around 3400 meters and, feeling the altitude, I took a nap only to be woken up by a British man named Steve knocking on our tent. We chatted with Steve a bit as the clouds would open from time to time. Steve lives in Bariloche, Argentina and teaches skiing and sailing. Not a bad life.

I tossed and turned for most of the night with the craziest dreams. We had mate and oatmeal for breakfast and packed some day bags for our hike. We climbed for most of the day over ridges up into the moraine, deeper into the mountains. We hiked slow and steady as the air got thinner and thinner. It was very easy to get out of breath so you have to walk with a ¨rest step,¨ where you pause and put all your weight on your bones before moving on. We got up to above the snowline and stopped at a high base camp, at around 4200 meters, almost 14000 feet! It was so exciting to have each step be the highest I had ever been. From this height we could see glaciers coming down from the mountains and crevasses cracking through them as the ice falls into the valley. Jeremy has done some serious mountain climbing in Bolivia and Ecuador and was knowledgable company. We cruised down and had mate and pasta while relaxing. We heard thunder in the distance and began to bomb-proof our tent in the anticipation of a storm. It began to rain and hail and did not let up for much of the night. We had a few discussions on how to tell how far a storm is from you by counting the time between the lightning and the thunder, although we never figured it out. The closest it got was four seconds.

In the middle of our sleepless night, when the rain and hail had stopped Jeremy went outside to pee and told me I had to see something. To our right and left the peaks were all covered with fresh snow. Below us, in the valley, a huge dark cloud sat, bolts of lightning exploding from all sides. As we admired the storm from a distance I looked up to the full moon. ¨I is just me or is the moon disapearing?¨ I said to Jeremy. Sure enough, slowly the moon began to go dark as we stumbled upon a lunar eclipse. We sat out, shivering as the sky got darker and darker swigging whiskey. Soon the sky was full of stars and the moon was only a sliver. We saw shooting stars, the milky way, and the southern cross. We waited out until the moon completely disapeared and the clouds rolled in again.

The next day we hiked out and took a bus back into Mendoza. Here we met up with Eric, Sage, and Lizz again and we will spend some days in town before we split up on our seperate ways. I have only five days left until school orientation begins and although my travels have been full of adventure it will be nice to settle down in a house with a family.