Argentina 4

We’ve reached the half way mark and apart from a 10 minute downpour while we were on a bus, we’ve had no rain at all except late one afternoon when we were already having a restful hotel break.   A couple of mornings have been cloudy til about 9 or 10 but apart from that, sunshine all the time. 

I confess we’ve found nothing about the Argentinian towns that appeal at all and the most pleasant so far seemed to be San Martin de los Andes because it was very green with trees and shrubs planted along all the roads.  Bunce luck has held again, no hotel booking for San Martin and my birthday, with the website we’ve used saying only 3 hotels in town with any vacances.  I should point out this really is peak season and there are no other towns for 2-3 hours driving.   So we pitched up at one of the three and it was the best we’ve been in.  Great view, spacious, beautifully designed in wood and stone, big guest sitting areas and obviously decorated by an artist with exquisite taste.  i.e. like mine.   They even cooked excellent vegetarian evening meals for us in the evenings.  About 8 rooms in a big place and the only other guests were 3 American couples who were on fly fishing holidays.  Imagine it, every day trying to outwit a fish.  They had 4 or 5 guides with them too.  So our wonderful hotel for 2 nights B & B with dinner specially cooked plus drinks - £190.   That for us is expensive here.  We just want a clean room with a bathroom, somewhere to dump our stuff and get out.  The hotels almost always cost us between 200 and 280 pesos, about £32 - £45 and they all include breakfast and wifi connection.

Bizarrely, San Martin also had a ‘city tour’ in a red London Routemaster bus which has been declared ‘Cultural Heritage of the Nation’.  Tragically, I’d left my bus pass at home. 

We are getting along OK in Spanish although when pronunciation and some words are different it is confusing.  It really is amazing what a smile and an attempt at someone’s language does to help.  Heather is doing well, having done more studying than me - those old habits die hard.  So Heather gets by having studied and I get by, by standing next to Heather.

A day’s drive over an unbelievably rough 100km track through a very weatherworn and stunningly beautiful rocky landscape got us to a road only 60kms from Bariloche where our next long coach ride awaited.  This was a 17 hour run to Mendoza, the wine region capital, approx 1250km by road to the north.

We had again managed to get upstairs front seats, cama class, which are fully reclining and fabulously comfortable.  Better than business class on a plane and a lot more things to look at from the window.  Airline type meals were provided but these sadly, were not business class quality.  Also different from the plane was playing long distance coach bingo, with the steward as caller.  Very familiar (dos senoras grande) and a bottle of wine as a prize.  Heather played.  Me, being such a misery carried on listening to my ipod and sorting photos on the laptop.

Early morning views of the sun hitting Aconcagua (highest mountain in the Americas) as we ran into Mendoza.  Out of the bus station, local bus (15p each) into town, dump the bags at our hotel looking over the central square and off for breakfast.   The overnight bus doesn’t sound good but these are double decker full size luxury coaches refitted with only 3 seats across the width and a total of about 40 or so passengers.  Each coach has two drivers and a steward.  We haven’t even bothered with first class yet !  The bus stations themselves are huge.  Buenos Aires was like a pitched battle with 70+ stands but many of the regional stations have more than 40 stands in them.  One place we stopped at for a 15 minute leg stretch even had a baggage carousel.   They’re not cheap though, this run cost about three times what we’d pay for a hotel but much of the travel is done painlessly while we’re asleep and we wake up somewhere different.  The landscape is lovely but 1000km of scrub would probably get a bit tedious.

Mendoza had a good atmosphere, especially in the evening where it was just warming up as we got back to our hotel at about 11.00 pm.  Still nothing to look at in the city, no interesting architecture, no art gallery to speak of and museums of ethnographic art and bits of pottery.  I know we should be interested but we just ain’t.

Just over three weeks and we haven’t met any Brits except for one girl who lives in Australia with her boyfriend.