Jannis & Martine

Right now we´re back in Buenos Aires again, but we didn´t write any blogs about last weeks visits, to Santiago, Mendoza and Cordoba. So I shall first start there…..

When we flew down in January to Patagonia via Santiago de Chili we decided to not spent any time in Santiago itself. We heard Santiago, Chili´s capital, was a dirty, dull city and full of smog. During our trip we met lots of Santiago people, who were all escaping the city and looking for fresh air. So that confirmed everything. But travelling through Chili for a long while, we also got curious to it´s capital. So eventually we ended up going there, on our way to Valparasio, a ´must see´ port city not far from Santiago.

With our expectations very low, we liked Santiago much better than we had expected. In fact, we liked it so much that, after hearing very bad stories about criminal Valparasio, we decided not to go there, and spent some more time in Chili´s capital.

Probably one of the reasons why we liked Santiago, was the great location of out hostel. Our hostel was situated in a really nice, calm and beautifully colonial area. And as a bonus, right in front of our hostel there was this really picturesque and romantic little square. The square was a perfect place to find a nice spot in the shadow, and just chill down with a book.  There are always people around and it always has a nice atmosphere.

On Saturday nights people buy beer in the kiosk around the corner, and the square gets used as a very cozy outside-bar, even though the area with the hip bars is very close. One night we got caught up when a bunch of local people gathered to play traditional music and dance on it. Another day we got curious as there was a big film crew around. As we sat down, we were quickly removed, as we had just sat down right in the film set of a Spanish Fanta commercial. It was fun to see how a commercial is filmed and to see a professional film crew at work.

Another thing we liked in Santiago was that if there is a nice building or cute church, it is always surrounded by a nice plaza or park, so it looks  even better. Besides this, there are two big hills in the city with parks, botanical gardens, a zoo and a fairytale castle, where you can escape the city. This is why Santiago has a very friendly look.

Santiago was our last stop in Chili (though maybe later on we might cross the border from Bolivia to Chili one last time) and from there we travelled to Argentina again. This time to Mendoza, the centre of Argentina´s wine-district.

We were planning to take the night bus to Mendoza, but were advised to take the bus during daytime, as it´s one of the prettiest border crossing around. As we passed two amazing border crossings through the Andes mountains before, we decided we didn´t want to miss it. And it turned out to be very spectacular. The movie ´Seven years in Tibet´ has been taped here for a reason!!

As we already had gotten enough excitement hiking in Bariloche and travelling to Santiagio de Chiliwith the night bus, we decided to hav a bit of a break in Mendoza, a perfect city to do this. We even rented an appartment here, so it felt a little bit like home again. Mendza even has trolley-buses driving around, like in Arnhem.

Mendoza is a very nice city. About 100 years ago it has been demolished by an earthquake. When is was rebuilt again, it was built with very wide lanes and lots of big squares, so in case of another earthquake, people had a place to evacuate. Because they have covered the city with very tall trees, irrigated by water from the nearby Andes mountains, it all gave us a very good impression.

One day we rented a bike and visited several wineries in the area. It was very nice to cruise around between the wineyards mixed in with olive trees. Also we did some wine tasting which has improved our knowledge of wines. For me that is not necessarily a good thing: I always thought to only like cheap (and therefore sweet) wines. But now it turns out that the cheap wines are not sweet but asic, and I don´t really like these. I like the sweet wines that are not too old & oaky, but they seem to be a bit expensive too.

From Mendoza we made a 2-day side trip to the relatively close-by national parks Valley de la Luna (moonvalley) and Talampaya. As the name moonvalley already says, it has a moonlike landscape. Because of erodation it has very interesting rock formations. In this park they have found oldest dinosaurier bones in the world. They have lived here before the Andes mountains was formed.

Besides the Grand Canyon in the United States, the Talampaya canyon is the biggest in the world. As you can imagine, it is very impressive. It also contains lots of impressive aboriginal rock paintings and rock carvings.  I´ll leave it up to the pictures to show this. The pictures of the parks will follow soon as we are again uploading pictures on our Flickr-webpage.

The next stop was the city of Cordoba, Argentina´s second biggest city. It is a strange city: very ugly and grey, but with some very beautiful parts. Cordoba used to be the centre of the Jesuit society, who came here 300 years ago to spread the Christian ideas to the natives. That´s why there is a lot of Jesuit heritage in and around Cordoba. Jannis is more into this, so I leave it up to him to write something about it in a next post.

And this gets us to we are now, Buenos Aires. Love to be back!!

Love Martine.

We did not have good internet facilities for almost two weeks, so we have not been able to blog anything.

But now we are again in a hostel with proper internet facilities, so we will give plenty of updates in the next days. I will only write a quick update now, because we just have arrived in Cordoba, Argentinia, by a night bus, so we are a bit of tired.

About two weeks ago we arrived in Santiago de Chili crossing from San Martin de los Andes, Argentinia, as you can read in the previous blog entry. We stayed in Santiago for almost a week, and skipped nearby Valperasio, as Santiago was a much nicer city than we had expected.

We then crossed the border again going back to Argentinia via a beautifull and impressive trip through Andes mountains, seeing the area where the famous Brad Pitt movie ´7 years in Tibet´ has been filmed.

After crossing the Andes we arrived in Medoza, Argentina´s main wine area. As we also liked Medoza al lot, and as we stayed in our own cheap, but very nice private appartment, we stayed in Medoza for almost a week and then left to see two beautifull and impressive UNESCO world heritage natural parks, the Talampaya canyon (the second biggest canyon in the world) and Valle de Luna, moon valley, as it looks like you are on the moon. We left this area yesterday evening to arrive in Cordoba this morning.

Tomorrow we will give some more information about what we have done and experienced in the city Santiago de Chili, the Mendoza wine area and the Talampaya & Valle de la Luna parks.

See you later.

Jannis.

Five days ago we arrived in Santiago, so now we are in Chili again.

Before we moved back to Chili we first went from Argentine´s holiday place for the ordinary rich, Bariloche, to Argentine´s holiday´s place for the extreme rich, San Martin. Between these two places is the famous ´Seven Lakes´ route, so we booked an ordinary bus which did this route in under 5 hours, by driving like a madman along curving dry sand covered mountain roads.

A very beautifull, but also a little terrifying experience…

The village of San Martin is purpose built in a beautifull valley for Argentine´s rich and famous, so it really doesn´t look and feel as a South-American place at all, as all houses look like little Austrian/Swiss-designed holiday villa´s, the roads are without holes, and its is prefectly clean everywhere. Even our hostel was a bit out of the ordinary as we not only had a very beautifully designed & very clean private room with a view onto the mountains; we also had a very nice private bathroom. Something we had not seen since we left Buenos Aires, two months ago.

All in all, San Martin was a very good place to recover a bit from our little extreme horsebackriding, cycling, hiking and bus experiences. Having recovered some, we also did some more hiking during the last days of our stay. One day we did a very nice trip to, it is said, one of the most beautifull mountains in the world: the Lanin vulcan. As this vulcan is located nearby San Martin, we took the opportunity to visit this vulcano via a combined ´bus-ride/hike/bus-ride´-trip. As ´nearby´ out here means anything located less than 200 kilomers away, this resulted in an exhausting, but nice, 12-hour long daytrip.

After having rested a bit, we left San Martin to cross the Andes mountains again. The first part of this ride involved crossing the Andes mountains via a very beautifull route, which included leaving the Argentinian border very close to the backside of the…

…Lanin vulcano.

Seeing the (snowless) backside of the vulcano while waiting at the Argentinian/Chilean border, was certainly a somewhat different experience than doing a long 12-hour ´bus-ride/hike/bus-ride´-trip to visit its (somewhat more beautifull snow covered) frontside…

Another problem at this border crossing is that you are not allowed to take any vegetables and fruit into Chili territory. In normal circumsances this is not a problem, but as we had planned travel another 12 hours to arrive the same night in Santiago we had brought some advocados with us, to put on our bread…

Convinced that dry bread is just uneatable, and knowing that most Chilean custums are pretty sloppy crossing, we decided to hide the advocados behind our jackets that we left behind in the bus. So we entered the customs building with our backpacks, but without the advocados. In this building we found out that they were (as we had expected) scanning all backpacks for illigal stuff, so no stress there. Then suddenly these customs guys entered the bus itself (never before we had seen them doing that) and were going to search the bus for left luggage and other stuff. They did find some left luggage, but did not look into our left behind jackets, so we safely entered Chili with a nice, but illigal, bread topping.

After this somewhat tense border crossing we had a very nice ride into Chili, even seeing the famous Pucon vulcano. This all changed again when we had to change buses….

The plan was to do an 8-hour long bus ride across the Andes, arriving late in the evening in Temuco, which is a pretty dodgy Chilean city. This was no problem, as the guy selling us our bus ticket had told us, there were plenty of bus companies at Temuco´s bus terminal where you could hop onto one of the many night buses to Santiago, our final destination. Verry happy that our Spanish was getting pretty good (this guy talked only in Spanish, but we understood him very well), we planned to arrive at Temuco´s bus terminal during the evening and then to directly hop on to a night bus to Santiago.

All looked very well, until we arrived at Temuco´s bus terminal at 10 o´clock in the evening. The terminal we arrived at, looked pretty small and then we realised that this was not the main terminal, but only one of the many little bus terminals scatered around this very big city (our Spanish was probably not that good after all). Getting a little panicked now, I hurried to the bus driver and asked him if we somehow could catch a bus to Santiago,…. AHORA (now)!!! Realising that we wanted to go on a bus to Santiago the same night, he and his assistant quickly got our backpacks out from the bagage compartment and ran, carrying our backpacks with them, and us behind them, to their company´s office. There got us on the last night bus that was leaving this little bus terminal only 10 minutes later…

Happy everything was all right again, we discovered yet another problem. They said we could only pay in cash for the bus ride, there was no cash machine nearby and we didn´t have many Chilean pesos with us. After some frantic talking, searching and counting we found out that we  had just enough Chilean cash with us, left over from our previous visits, to pay for two cheap seats…

Only ten minutes later we left the dark and  dodgy ciy of Temuco again on our (not so comfortable, but no complains there) 8-hour night bus ride to Santiago, to arrive there safely in the morning.

Tomorrow we will leave Chili again for yet anoher crossing of borders and the Andes mountains, to arrive in Argentina again. We hope this bus ride will go smoother than the last one!

Jannis.

As Jannis wrote in his last post, I´m supposed to write a bit about our outdoor actvities around Bariloche.

Well, last week has been one with quite some exercise….

First of all we started off to go along with Fernando and Gulaya, an American couple, who went on a horsebackriding trip in the mountains. For me it was the first time, so I wasn´t very happy with the drill-instructor we had. We didn´t get any time to get used to riding on a horse and feel comfortable with it, as we almost immediately went into a steep hilly part (even Jannis had to get used to riding in the mountains). The instructor certainly didn´t help: all he did was shouting ´use the stick, use the stick, USE THE STICK´, to hit the horse.  But I didn´t want to use the stick, mostly because I didn´t want my horse to go any faster.

Luckily I had this really nice horse which seemed to feel that he had to be careful with me, and he took me gently to the top. Arriving there I even get to enjoy the great view a little bit. The way back down already went much better, as I had more confidence in horsebackriding. I don’t know if I’d ever go again, though….

On another day we decided to hire a bike, and Fernando, Gulaya and 3 other people from our hostel decide to come along to cycle ‘Circuito Chico’ (the small circuit) – a 25 km circuit along a hilly peninsula close by.

The last activity we did was trekking trough the national park. We planned to do a 3-day trekking, so stay 2 nights in refugios on the way.

We left the day after the bike ride, but because the first day was going to be an easy walk, we thought we wouldn´t need a day rest in between. We thought…….
But after arriving at night at our refugio at 1700 m high we knew it hadn´t been an easy walk!! The walk was going to take us 3 hours, but after we had walked for 2 hours, we suddenly came across a sign saying it was 3 hours more to our refugio. Having started late in the afternoon, we happely just made it before sunset.

After we started our walk the second day, we knew why the walk on the first day was called ´easy´. The second day the walk was even harder.
We had been informed that the second day we had to cross two mountain peaks. We started fresh and we looked with confidence at the first peak we had to cross, as we were already on 1700 meters high. So it couldn´t be too hard. But we were wrong. After climbing this peak, we realised we still weren´t at the peak itself, the other half was hidden. So we only had climbed just half of it…… We had a fare bit of the other half to go, while the track became more and more difficult.

You think of a track as an path you can walk over, so it´s obvious where to go. But this wasn´t such a track. The track was a marking of some red dots. You see a red dot on some rocks a bit away, so you know where to go, but you have absolutly no idea how to get there. At one stage we had lost the red dots at all and ended up in this really uncomfortable situation on a scary slippery part. But because it has been really difficult to get to the point you are at that time, you also do NOT want to have to go back the same way. It feels like a ´point of no return´.
After this heavy climb my left knee really started to play up.

In one of our hikes in El Chalten we met this guy who was stumbeling his way down to get back, which took him ages, but it was the only way out. Very painful. I didn´t want to end up like him, so with him as an example and knowing we still had another mountain peak to climb, we decided to go back to civilization when we found a way out.

Three Argentinian men had told us that after the first peak, there was another path leading to Cerro Cathedral, a big ski area. This path was staying on the same level, so we wouldn´t have to climb or decent anymore, and from this area you could go down with a skilift. We could even see this skilift in the far distance.
So we took the oppurtunity to go back.

It was one of the most beautiful tracks I have ever hiked, looking over this impressive valley. But for us it definitely was also the toughest and most scary one ever! The whole way we were climbing on slippery rocks looking down the valley.  What made it more scary was that during the 3 hours hike to the skilift we saw nobody. Then we found out that the skilift was being repaired, so it was totally abandoned. We were stuck on the mountain at 2000 meters high!

Just before we arrived at the skilift, luckily, 3 guys had showed up behind us. But these guys had no clue whatsoever, as they were stubbernly looking for a non-existing refugio.

So we looked further, but we only found more abandoned skilifts, and in the meanwhile it started to get pretty misty.

Then we found a fresh car track, and we thought following this track would take us down. When this car track ended at another abandoned skilift (and by this time the mist had really taken away any view at all) and it became later and later, we started to get panicking.

We rang the Argentine 112/911: no connection!! Calling with our Dutch mobile, we didn´t know the countrycode for Argentina…

Luckily just 5 minutes later the mist cleared up, and we saw a little village in the valley, which turned out to be the base of the Cerro Cathedral ski area. It was still a long walk going down, but at least we got somewhere to go.

We just made it before dark, so we stayed overnight in the ski village and we had never been happier to enjoy a nice meal and have a proper bed to stay in.

Love, Martine.

We are going to leave Bariloche tomorrow, so here are some general impressions…

First of all, we only had planned to stay here for a couple of days as this area is supposed to be something you should not miss, but is also THE place where all of Argentinia´s rich go on a holiday. So, as we thought it would be very expensive to stay here, the plan was to have a quick look around in Bariloche and then move up north.

This all changed when we arrived in Bariloche and noticed that the hostels over here are not too expensive (at least no El Calafate/Ushuaia-like prices) and are of very good quality, with a very nice staff, good big kitchens and even offer great views on the mountians.

One of the other things that makes Bariloche great, is the hiking in the mountains around here, but Martine will go more into this subject in the next post.

The other thing which makes Bariloche a great place to stay is the food. As across the border in Chili, lots of Germans have moved here, but the good thing here is that it there are not only Germans and Spanjards here. Lots of Italian people live here too. And this you immidiately notice after you arrive from Chili in the…

…food & drinks.

I have never had any better icecream than here, there are Swiss/German-chocolate shops everywhere and I again had some really good coffee here.

But the best food experience we had was when we went out for dinner, the night before we were going on our 2-day mountain hike. We first only wanted to eat a little bit in a tiny restaurant which serves only very small dishes, as it is a sort of a Tapas-restaurant but with non-Spanish dishes, such as curry and lasagna. After having a taste of a marvellous and very difficult to prepare risoto-lasagna, we ended up ordering more than six dishes. This really was the best place where we have eaten in the past 5 months.

To make things better, there are not only great hostels here, great food and great outdoor activities, but Bariloche also seems to be the place where all the nice and interesting travellers end up.

The first day we met Fernando and Gulaya, an American couple, who asked us to come along on a horse riding tour, which we did, but only after they had moved over to our new hostel with its Hilton-like views on the mountains. In return we invited them on a biking trip through the mountains and made them a typical Dutch dinner:

´hutspot´…

They returned that favour by preparing a delicious trout&salad-dish, so we offered them a free place to stay if they visit Holland during their 1-year round the world trip, as we still owed them after they had prepared us such a delicious meal…

As said, Martine will tell much more about our activities here in the next post, but in the meantime you can check Fernando´s and Gulaya´s blogsite for the things we have done with them, including lots of pictures. See the Page (see the upper right corner of this website) with the title Sites from people we know for a link to their blogsite.

Another interesting person we met was Jonathan Human who is travelling around for a couple of weeks.

Jonathan is not only a very good & creative cook (he made too much salad & desert yesterday, so we had some) and a gifted musician, but he also has some very original ideas. He, for example, changed his surname to ´Human´ after having gone trough an indian-ritual-thing a couple of years ago. Check out his websites for more on the Page (see the upper right corner of this website) with the title Sites from people we know.

After having seen & done great things here and met some great people, we will move up north to San Martin tomorrow and than cross the border to Chili,

to change country again.

Jannis.