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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.