Our main mission in Mendoza was to learn about the region’s wines. The city is Argentina’s capital of winemaking, which in itself is a good enough reason for a visit. But it’s also a rather cool city, with wide tree-lined streets, shady plazas with fountains and statues, a strong street-café culture, great bars and restaurants… where better to spend Easter?

Mendoza wine time

Mendoza sits amongst an ocean of vineyards at the base of the Andes where the mountains sweep down to meet the pampas plains. It has an extremely dry climate and our smarty-pants research reading taught us that the desert environment, with the carefully controlled artificial irrigation of the vines, is one of the several factors contributing to the region’s success producing fine wines. But there are few things duller than reading about wines when you are actually there in the heart of wine country. Purely in the interests of educational investigation you understand, we felt an overwhelming sense of duty to get out there and do a bit of practical research to report back to Cuthbert readers.

There’s no shortage of opportunities to ‘do wine’ in Mendoza. First we tried a few by the glass with meals in restaurants and we also went out to some vineyards. But we decided that if we are going to learn a bit about the fine-stuff, we ought to take a wine-tasting session with some experts in town. Vineyard wine tasting sessions can be very good, but they are often restricted to the wines produced at that vineyard and their aim, unsurprisingly, is generally to encourage a purchase of their produce. By contrast, local independent experts Luciana and Ornela at Taninas Wine Lounge chose a selection of wines for us from a range of regional vineyards. They explained a bit about the wines, the grapes and the makers, and compared them whilst serving with a selection of empanadas that they had chosen to pair with the wines. It was a rather more sophisticated experience than we have become used to since we hit the road but it was a really fun event with just six guests; we learned loads and had a lovely evening together.

Another unmissable treat in the Mendoza/Maipu area is lunch at Casa Coupage. This isn’t quite a restaurant in the traditional sense, but a beautiful dining room (actually as the weather was fine, a gorgeous shady patio table under vine-pergolas) at an out-of-town vineyard-bodega. Here Inés and Michel serve the most amazing gourmet food and fine wines by reservation only. Their 5 course taster menu was extraordinary and although we did rather blow our budget on the whole Mendoza food and wine scene, when compared to similar quality fare in UK the value for money is amazing here.

Easter Planning

So far we may have given the impression that we did little more in Mendoza than drink and eat (in that order). Well we did indeed do quite a lot of that, but we did see a few sights too. At the museum to the Argentinian national independence hero, General San Martín we were keen to learn a bit about the chap who lends his name to so many streets, plazas around the country. Sadly, the museum was piled high with unidentifiable artefacts and a noticeable absence of any explanations. Oh well, we can be compensated with a cappuccino and spot of people-watching from one of Mendoza’s many cool pavement-cafés. Incidentally… we must surely not be the only ones to notice that the popular 20^th Century global pastime of people-watching from street-cafes, has now in the 21^st Century taken second place to the new trend of smartphone-watching in the wi-fi age.

Another ‘event’ for our time in Mendoza was a bit more work on Cuthbert. Regular readers may recall from a few weeks ago, Cuthbert’s intermittent ‘mystery wobble’ from the rear differential. Well Marcus finally decided that the bearing needed changing. Since Puerto Montt we had been carrying all the parts to do the job, so in Mendoza it was finally done. As usual, the ‘techie gurus’ amongst you can see the detail at Marcus’ technical write-up of the operation.

Yet another bit of excitement for our time in Mendoza was to plan ahead for the next couple of weeks. Now… as regular readers will almost certainly be tired of hearing from us, we’re not too keen on planning ahead: “Yes, yes… we know… you prefer to just turn up and see what’s what”. But sometimes ‘needs must’ and right now is one such occasion. Over Easter our thoughts turned (naturally) to the not so far away Easter Island and the fact that it is rapidly reaching the end of its prime visiting season. Cripes… we’d better get a wiggle-on to see it before the rains start! On-line we go, and in no time at all we are booked to fly from Santiago to Easter Island in two weeks. Marvellous. We’re a bit excited about this… so we’d better start heading back over the Andes in the general direction of Chile again!

A slightly sad footnote to our time in Mendoza was hearing about the recent crime increase in the city. On our first day there Marcus was approached in a supermarket carpark by a friendly local. He was interested to find out about Cuthbert, but also warned about the recent significant increase in city street crime. As we drove through the suburbs, the high levels of physical security around the houses reminded us of Johannesburg. We certainly haven’t seen this much barbed wire in any other South American city so far. The tourist information offices have prominent posters with security advice for visitors – mostly common-sense stuff, but nevertheless they have obviously considered the risk sufficient to require raising awareness.

Aconcagua 

Anyway… after a week in Mendoza we eventually left the coolest city and headed into the mountains with our tummies extremely full. We’ve really enjoyed all the wine stuff here, but it’s not the last we’ll see of vineyards! We have more wine regions to come on the trip.

It’s a very beautiful drive up the valley from Mendoza into the mountains. It’s only about 160 km to the border, but we took our time and stopped a couple of days to enjoy some sunny weather by the Potrerillos Reservoir. After the small town of Uspallata, the road starts to climb-proper towards the pass and there are a few things to see en-route to the border. First there is the curiously orange striped Puente del Inca (Bridge of the Inca). The bridge and the colour is all natural, no one spilled paint here, the mineral deposits have accumulated on the rocks over thousands of years. It used to be a famous treatment spa and it even features in Darwin’s accounts of his travels in the area, but it’s now crumbling from overuse by humans and animals and has been reduced to a visual stop-off at the side of the road.

One of the last turnings off the road in Argentina before reaching Chile is into the Aconcagua Park, which someone had the inspirational idea of naming after its main attraction: Mount Aconcagua. At 6,960 m (22,800 ft) Aconcagua is the highest peak outside of the Himalayas. We thought a bit of hiking would work off all the calories we consumed in Mendoza and a quick jaunt up Aconcagua would certainly do that. But we’re in a bit of a hurry you see, got a flight to catch. Otherwise we would of course have popped up there for the view 😉

So instead of tackling the peak, we settled for the short walk to the viewpoint in the park. It’s not far and it’s not a steep climb, but even this minor endeavour was a surprising challenge in the thin air at over 10,000ft. It was late afternoon and the clouds had, rather spitefully, come in to spoil our view to the peak. We decided to stay in the car-park for the night and see if it was any clearer in the morning.

At sunrise we looked out and… good news! It’s clear sky! From our bed in Cuthbert we could just see the east-facing peak down the valley and it was starting to glow a wonderful pinky-orange as the sun came up around it. Uncharacteristically, we jumped out of bed and pulled on warm clothes to run up the path to the view-point again. The educated Cuthbert reader may realise that, being sunrise, it was of course very early in the day and therefore rather cold. But soooo worth the effort to get out of our centrally heated Cuthbert. We arrived at the viewpoint, out of breath, just in time to get a few pics before the cloud started to move in and the sun-rise glow faded. Splendid 🙂

A bit over the top!    

Unaccustomed as we are to rising so early in the morning, we decided to make the most of the dawn start and drive a few kilometres to our next ‘Andes Highlight’ before stopping for breakfast. It’s helpful here to understand that although the actual borderline runs right through the highest peaks down the middle of the Andes, the formalities for leaving Argentina and entering Chile are undertaken at a single point after crossing the mountains, about 8km inside Chile. The journey from one side of the mountains to the other can be covered by either the newer super-fast main-road tunnel through the mountains, or the old steep, unpaved mountain track with countless hairpin bends over the mountains. No prizes for guessing which one we’re taking.

It wasn’t so much the drive that persuaded us to take this ‘over the top’ route, but the opportunity to visit our next ‘Andes Highlight’ breakfast stop – the Cristo Redentor (Christ Redeemer) statue standing on the exact borderline at the top of the pass. The statue was erected at the turn of the 20^th Century to commemorate the final peace in the Argentine/Chilean border dispute. Up there are the former border post buildings, together with the obligatory café/tat-shop that was obviously closed on an out-of-season Friday morning. After Cuthbert successfully negotiated the climb up the Argentinian side, we sat on the top at 12,600 ft asl (3,840 m) and enjoyed our porridge with spectacular views. We got out for a brisk walk around the top, but it didn’t take long for the thin air to again take effect as we tackled some short steep slopes.

Setting off down the Chilean side we discussed how we should be Santiago by lunchtime/early afternoon. Oh, how wrong could we be??? As we came off the top and rounded the first bend, we caught sight down the valley of a loooong queue of vehicles on the main road in the distance faaaar below us. It soon dawned on us that this must be the queue to the Los Libertadores border-post. After a long, slow, descent of many, many more hair-pin bends, we finally joined the queue on the main road. The line of vehicles snaked all the way down the valley ahead of us as far as we could see. Our sat-nav indicated that we were 2.8 km from the border post and the queue did not appear to be moving much. Joy! 🙁  So no need to make plans for the rest of the day then! After two hours the sat-nav was still showing 2 km to go, but at least we could wait in the comfort of Cuthbert and our own living room, making cups of tea (writing a travel blog) and having lunch during the wait. Not so for most of the other poor sods in the queue… sitting in cars and standing in the cold at the side of the road to leg-stretch – no bathrooms, kitchens, kettles etc. There wasn’t even a wily entrepreneur making a few pesos selling cold coffee and empanadas!

Finally, we reached the border-post but this was not the end of our trials. Oh no! The last five hours sat in our vehicle was merely the queue to join the queue! The border hall was, by a long chalk, the most over-crowded and chaotic that we have experienced in South America so far, in fact… the worst anywhere! Thinking back to previous travels, even the considerable ordeal of driving into such administratively burdensome countries as Saudi Arabia or Uganda was a more efficient experience than here. Anyway… after three weeks in Argentina and a total of six hours at the border, we are finally back in Chile again. It’s just a short hop down to the capital, Santiago and in a few days we’ll leave Cuthbert behind and fly off to Easter Island! Yes… tucks-a-bit-excited.com !  🙂

Link to next blog: Easter Island        Link to full South America Blog

Mendoza – Andes Gallery