By now we are in Junín de los Andes. There is very little time to write on this trip, so for now I'll just post a few pictures from the trip on the Ruta 40 and more dusty, bumpy roads through beautiful stands of old Araucaria, and along the Rio Aluminé, to our current location. We are going to visit another estancia today. It's cool and quite windy, a high of +12 expected, but it should be dry.
It’s cool this morning after a succession of showers and thunderstorms during the night, and the air smells fresh and clean, a welcome change from yesterday’s muggy heat. I’m sitting on the tiled patio of “La Mimosa”, the impressive villa in La Falda, Argentina we are renting from relatives for the duration of our stay in this town in the province of Cordoba for about a week.
It is hard to imagine that we left home only six days ago, exchanged late autumn weather with late spring here in Argentina. We flew to Santiago and took a plane of LATAM airlines a few hours later to cross the Andes to Mendoza, Argentina, the heart of the country’s wine growing area. The brief (45 minute) flight was spectacular, the endless succession of snow-covered peaks putting things in perspective once again: our lives so small, so brief set against this frame. Mercifully brief, too, the thought of the doomed flight that left a Uruguayan rugby team stranded in this vast mountain wilderness more than fifty years ago, their plight to survive. No, better to simply be filled with awe.
There’s commotion in the tall old trees surrounding the house: a hawk of some kind is being chased off by a group of brilliant green monk parakeets. The variety of birdsong is amazing and ceases only for the few hours of total darkness to be replaced by the hum of insects. The “Merlin” bird app I installed on my phone tells me that it recognizes 57% of birds here in Argentina, which is still a lot given the huge number of bird species in this country.
We spent a relaxing couple of days in Mendoza, enjoying the shady plazas and parks. Only very rarely is there a street not shaded by big trees. It’s a good place to start a holiday, to start practicing Spanish again. It’s always a bit of a shock to find how different real life is from the clearly spoken lessons I’ve worked on for the last few weeks. Vowels are swallowed, sometimes whole syllables, and the speed makes it nearly impossible to catch more than a few words here and there. Still, each side manages to get their point across in some way.
Thursday night (Nov.21) we took the night bus to La Falda, a nine-and-a-half-hour trip. The ‘cama’ seats, fully reclining, were sold out, but our ‘semi cama’ were comfortable, too, and we slept at least part of the time. When we arrived in La Falda at five in the morning, Johann’s brother awaited us: he and my sister-in-law arrived here about a week before us, and we are going to spend much of our stay with them. We had prepared ourselves to walk to “La Mimosa”, about two kilometres, much of it uphill, and we didn’t worry about it: it’s cool in the early morning, and we had time, after all. Still, it was nice to get to our destination a bit quicker and find a bed waiting for us, adding a couple of hours of sleep to the somewhat sparse amount on the bus.
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By now two more days have passed, and our time here in La Falda is nearing its end: tomorrow morning we’ll head southwestward towards San Rafaél, another city in Argentina’s wine growing area. The time here has passed quickly, each day including at least a hike in the surrounding hills, a couple with more elaborate adventures. It is high time to write about my impressions: the long travelling days ahead likely won’t allow for that.
