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- Hostel Lao
Thursday was an exciting day because we were leaving for Mendoza! I took my clothes to the laundry place before class and did some other small things to prepare for the trip. After class I packed my backpack and away we went. This bus trip wasn’t quite as far as the last one…only 18 hours. The funny thing is if you were to drive the same distance in the states it would probably only take 10 at the most, maybe less. We went in another double-decker diesel bus, but this one was even nicer. The seats were better than a first class airplane and laid down all the way! We spent the night trying to catch up on sleep, but the roads hear are not the greatest so the night was filled with bumps and stopping to pay tolls along the way. There was a lot of fog so we arrived in Mendoza a couple of hours behind schedule. We took a cab to the hostel which was called Hostel Lao and was a paradise like experience that only cost us $10 dollars for our one night there. We showered and ate breakfast and then made plans for the day. We roamed the city for an hour or so and stopped by a travel agency where we booked a tour to visit some of the wineries that afternoon. We ate lunch at a place along the pedestrian avenue. Our waiter was really fun and we spent a good chunk of time conversing with him and getting advice for things to do and see in Mendoza. After lunch we headed back to the hostel to wait for the tour to pick us up. While we were waiting we booked a horse riding excursion for Saturday. The wine tour that we booked was in Spanish so the tour was filled with Argentinean travelers just visiting for the weekend. There was also one guy from England, but unfortunately for him; he hadn’t realized that the tour was in Spanish and didn’t understand any of it. We went to 3 distinct wineries and at each place we got to sample two or three different types of wine. Every place also gave us a small lesson in how to evaluate wines. By the end we were feeling like drunken wine connoisseurs! Our last stop was at a factory that made olive oil and canned olives. After the last stop we hopped back on the bus for the ride into town. Along the way we watched the sun set over the Andes; it was incredible. I kept wishing that the bus would stop so we could get out and take pictures of the sunset; but we had to settle for photos out of the bus window, which of course didn’t turn out that great. Seeing the sunset made me really excited for the horseback riding excursion that we were planning for tomorrow. After the tour, I took a 20 minute powernap in the hostel and then we headed out for supper. We went to this typical Argentinean restaurant where we had an amazing steak dinner for $10 US dollars. That never gets old! After supper we returned to the hostel where to our surprise they were serving free wine. I figured I had already had enough for one day; but it was free so I said I would take a little bit. The guy pouring the glass didn’t know when to stop so I spent the next couple of hours chatting with other world travelers (mostly from England and Australia) over a glass of Malbec. After that; I showered and went to bed in order to be well rested for the next day’s adventures.
The next morning Jessi and I got up early and packed up all of our stuff. We ate breakfast and put checked out of the hostel. Then we sat down and started waiting for the tour group to come pick us up again. Unfortunately, bad luck seems to follow me here and the taxi drivers in Mendoza had decided to go on strike and block off some of the streets causing traffic to be horrendous. Also, the tour was running on Argentine time (which means it was about a half hour late to begin with) we were supposed to be picked up between 8:30 and 9:00, but we didn’t actually get picked up until after 10:00. We both wished we could have slept in, but we were so excited that the frustration didn’t last long. The drive to the mountains lasted about 20 minutes and the beautiful scenery we saw along the way was a good indicator of how good the experience was going to be. We arrived at the ranch and watched as the rancher and the tour guide got everything ready. Finally it was time to start. I watched Jessi (who is an experienced rider) get on the horse and tried to mimic very closely her actions. Luckily, I was riding the smallest horse so it wasn’t so hard to get on (although I’m sure I looked ridiculous nonetheless!) Ironically, my horse was named gringo and so there were a lot of jokes about a gringa on a gringo. These horses are used to carrying foreigners and had been trained to respond to non verbal cues, supposedly. We started off without a problem and my horse naturally ended up at the back of the pack which I was fine with because I didn’t really have to do anything he seemed to understand to just follow everybody else. However, this didn’t last for long. Turns out this horse liked to lag behind lazily maybe munch on some grass and then trot to catch up. I was definitely not ready the first time he decided to trot! Also, I would keep telling it with my non-verbal cues to stay caught up with the group, but nothing seemed to work. After about an hour and a half we stopped for a break and had some bread and mate, the tea that is so famous throughout South America. It was the first time that I tried mate, and I’d have to say it wasn’t as bad as other students had made it sound. After we got back on the horses, gringo really decided that he didn’t want to listen. Finally, I started talking to him in Spanish and to my surprise he listened perfectly to commands given in Spanish! After discovering that, the rest of the ride went without major incident. I spent the next hour taking in the beautiful scenery comfortable with my ability to manage Gringo. The moon was visible even though it was the middle of the day and was somehow magically centered over the closest range of the Andes. In the distance we could see the snow capped peeks and then the volcano further in the distance a snow covered volcano. The views from that journey are not something I will soon forget.
After we were dropped back off at the hostel we retrieved our stuff and used the bathrooms to shower. We returned to the pedestrian street and ate a big lunch knowing that the food on the bus would probably not be all that great. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering through the plazas littered with street vendors. Mendoza has a beautiful plaza about every three blocks! At about 5:00 we walked back to the hostel to get our bags and then walked the 5 blocks to the bus station where we caught our bus back to Buenos Aires.
