Uspallata and over the Andes

From Mendoza my destination was Santiago in Chile ready for my flight to New York, but by this stage in my travels I was way ahead of schedule and had plenty of time before the flight so I decided to stop at the little town of Uspallata. This is right on the edge of the Andes and only a short distance from Aconcagua, South Americas biggest peak and the bigest mountain outside of the Himalayas.

Uspallata by night

I had looked into a joining a tour to climb the peak but it was the end of the season and climbing permits had ended a couple of weeks earlier so I will have to save the climb for another visit. From Uspallata though I was able to make day trips into Aconcagua park and do some short hikes. On my first day in the hostel I met a Greman girl called Heidi who was planning to do the same as myself, so we headed out together the next day by bus to the park and did a short walk before heading down to the nearby town of Puente del Inca to see a natural stone bridge over the river (also visited by Charles Darwin so I learned).

Inca bridge

Then a quick visit to the cemetary for all the climbers who have died on Aconcagua and we thumbed a lift back to the hostel.

Aconcagua cemetery

The next day we hired bikes from the town and cycled into the desert to see a feature called 7 coloured mountain. I didnt excpect it to be too amazing but I was surprised to find that it really was very colourful. It was an hour and a half cycling uphill to get there but barely twenty minutes of racing down the dirt road back into town.

Desert Biking

Most of this stuff really needs pictures so I will update this post once I am able.

Heidi left the next day so I went for a walk into the desert nearby the hostel on my own, I was aiming to climb a peak and get views across the valley to the Andes, the peak I chose was a lot higher than I was expecting when I started and it took a full four hours of hard climbing to get to the top but the views were amazing.

View from the top - Uspallata valley and the Andes.

From the top I had hoped to find an easier route down as the one I had taken up was not suitable for descending and I was pretty much through all the water I had taken with me. I was out of luck as there were no easy routes down and so it took me another two hours to descend. After reaching the hostel I was told by the owner that I had walked into a military area, he was a bit anoyed as he said he was responsible for his guests, I told him that it was traditional to put up signs and fences as I had passed none, he wasnt too pleased. I am still trying to find out how high the mountain I claimbed was.

My last day of adventure in Uspallata was a return to Aconcagua park for a longer walk, this time up to Confluencia Basecamp, this is the first campsite for climbers on their way up Aconcagua and sits at about 3500meters, not too high but since Uspallata is only at about 1900meters it was a big height gain for the day and got me breathing a bit harder.

Looking towards Aconcagua

The views from here are amazing and just a short walk from the campsite is the end of a glacier that snakes its way along one side of the mountain. Unfortunatly there wasnt time to explore further and I had to head back down, even so I had missed the bus and faced with a long wait for the next one I thumbed a lift again and got back to the hostel a lot faster.

High altitude traffic jam

My next destination is Santiago and to get here I had to cross over the Andes, there is a road winding its way into the mountains and through a tunnel which eventually spits you out into the neighbouring country - the high altitude boarder post is interesting but what is far cooler are the 29 switchbacks that take the road down the mountain on the other side, at times I could peer out of the bus window and see the road looping around below me again and again as it headed down the slope. There are no barriers to the roads so if we had gone off the edge we wouldnt have stopped for a long time.

Long descent

Buenos Aires

I am falling behind a bit in my blogs so I will keep them short and try and catch up. I am already back in Santiago Chile but I have yet to write about most of Argentina. I still can´t add any pictures yet, either because the hostel PC´s wont let me or because I dont trust them not to be riddled with viruses and I dont want to loose my pictures so I will update some of my blogs once I am back in the UK and add pictures then.

Anyway, back to BA. I spent about a week in the city and liked it more than I expected, I am not into big cities but BA is a lot of fun with plenty to do. The hostel I was in was great with other interesting travellers to chat to, which helped a lot.

One of the stranger tourist activities I got up to was visiting a cemetary, it sounds odd but it is a must see for anyone in BA. First up it is packed with many of Argentinas rich and famous (and dead), a few presidents, some great military leaders, and probably most well known to the world Eva Peron (known by most people as Evita). The cemetary isnt full of gravestones as the caskets aren´t burried, instead they are placed in morseleums, each family having its own little building, the richer the family the more ostentatious the tomb. The cemetary is massive, like a town with little streets running between the tombs.

The nightlife of Argentina takes a bit of getting used to, they often dont eat dinner until 10pm and head out for the first drinks of the evening at midnight, so the clubs dont even open until 2pm and kickout time is generally when most people are getting up for work the next day, I managed a couple of nights but couldnt get into the locals routine without tuning into a vampire.

On one of the nights out I went to a drumming session called La Bomba del Tiempo, a kind of folky drumming band who were on stage for a couple of hours of fast and lively music.

The city has plenty of museums and architecture to see so I had a bit of culture and saw some of the modern and fine art galleries. The rest of my time was spent being a tourist, visiting areas of the city like the working class area of La Boca which is famous for its colourful tin buildings and tourists getting mugged. I wasnt all that impressed as it seems like the neighbourhood has been done up for tourists and was way too much like a theme park for my likeing. A far more enjoyable activity was getting a coffee in one of the sidewalk cafes and watching the people go by.

Resistencia

Well I was due to stay in Paraguay for about six weeks at a voluntary job but the organisation at the place was lacking to say the least so I only spent two weeks there before deciding to head out for a bit more travelling. With an extra months travelling to play with I headed south out of Paraguay in the direction of Buenos Aires.First stop was Resistencia just over the boarder into Argentina, The town is very easy to sum up - dont bother going! Its a relatively pointless town to visit as a tourist with no attractions, it is in no way geared up for the transitory traveller. There are no hostels that I could find so I stayed in a cheap but nice enough hotel but this isnt a great way to meet other people and there was no internet for me to plan my next destination. In most towns this wouldnt be a problem, just find an internet cafe, it wasnt until my third and last day in town that I finally found one, and it wasnt working. I never did manage to track down the tourist information either! It rained seemingly consantly here, indoor activities are few, activities in general are few. I did spot what appeared to ba an art museum - closed. On the plus side there are a limitless amount of pharmacies here, practically one on each corner, there are only slightly fewer shops offering all manner of printing and photocopying services.

Street sculpture in rainy Resistencia

The memorable highlight of my couple of days here was a crash outside my hotel between a motorbike and a car. The bikerider lay in the street motionless in the rain for quite some time with police and bystanders milling about and not a single person giving him any medical attention. I finally headed down to the street to see if I could at least make sure he was still breathing when the ambulance arrived. There followed what seemed to be some fairly sloppy medical handling of him onto a stretcher and he was whisked away in the ambulance. I want back to watching TV in my room, I was glad to leave that evening on an overnight bus to Rosario.