How hot is it?

Mendoza :: Argentina

Summer in the 'doze.

Places: Mendoza.

Coolest thing I did: Stood at 4000m on the border of Argentina and Chile and had my picture taken with the Christ the Redeemer of the Andes.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The highest mountain in the world outside the Himalayas is in Argentina. At 6900m Aconcagua isn't even in the list of the tallest 100 mountains in the world, but it's the largest in the Americas.

Getting off the night bus before 10am you can already tell that the interior of Argentina is far hotter than BA could ever hope to be. The one thing I'd really wanted to do while I was here was head off to the little hamlet of Maipu just south of Mendoza itself in order to hire a bike and ride between wineries and get slowly more drunk. I'd been told that if you got too drunk you just left the bike in the grass on the side of the road and they came and got it later. That was the first reason. The second reason is I've made it my lifelong mission to do anything this whinging fool complains about. Seriously, how do you get a travel blog with a nationwide audience and spend all your time complaining. Man, that column makes me mad.

Anyway, the bloke in the hostel did say you could still hire bikes in the heat of summer but practically no-one does it for the obvious reason that once you've ridden 10km to a winery in near 40 degree heat the last thing you actually want to do is drink red wine. That kind of could have been pointless. So instead we got on what was going to be a "minibus" which in the A-zone means "massive bus full of old people". I was ready to be mad at this latest round of being Argentinaed, but then I remembered I wasn't supposed to be whinging and enjoyed myself instead.

Mendoza is basically situated in a desert that leads up to the foothills in the Andes and has extremely low rain fall according to the guide, who was telling us this as the wind shield was being pounded in heavy rain. The only reason it's a good wine growing region is people have been artificially irrigating here since the Incas and the soil is good for growing various grapes, stone fruits and olives that mostly get mashed into extra virgin olive oil. As you look out over the endless rows of grape vines you're given an awesome view of them ending with the snow caps of the Andes in the background. It's an amazing sight, especially as we were given the dramatic effect of storms coming out over the mountains as it seems to have been raining up there almost constantly since we got to the 'doze.

The tour took us to the Chandon factory (they have one in a few places outside France apparently, including Oz), an olive oil press and a smaller boutique winery, Vistandes, which was in a building designed by someone who obviously majored in airport design at architecture school. I didn't mind the wine, it tasted about as good as any bottle I've gotten from the supermarket here at 40 pesos (about 9 AUDs) but it was actually the olive oil that was a revelation. I knew nothing about how that stuff gets made and when they lay out all the plates with bread drizzled in different oils I probably smashed my fair share. Which you had to be quick on because it seems the Argies and Chileans who were on the tour don't hold back - be it wine or oily bread it's every man for himself and elbows at the ready.

The coolest fact I learned from the day is when there is hail it smashes the grapes so the government has funded the bigger vineyards to install devices that emit a frequency undetectable to human ears but smashes the hailstones into little bits so the can't do any damage to the grapes. I thought that was awesome if it's true.

Mendoza itself seems like a lively looking town, however due to this being the height of summer and many of the 'dozers off at the beach in Chile or Uruguay it's also mostly dead in the middle of the day. No-one really wants to be out in town when it's that hot so most of the shops in town shutdown for a 4 and a half hour siesta at noon. It's enforced a whole load of lazing about during the day when not doing things. I like it here, but much like BA I don't get the feeling I'm seeing it at it's best. Next time I'll come to the North of Argentina in spring I reckon. The nice thing about here as opposed to BA is they've managed to avoid the urge to put roads with 18 lanes through the middle of town. You don't often feel like you need to plan the next 20 minutes crossing the road.

The other big day trip we did, which didn't involve wine for a change, was to hire a car and drive up into the Andes to see some mountainous stuff. The scenery is so dramatically different to the south, with much drier, rust coloured mountains and mostly dry river beds at this time of year. The main thing you go to do is look at Aconcagua, which is the highest mountain in the Americas. Before you do that, however, you end up stopping at something called Punte del Incas, which has nothing at all to do with the Incas as far as I can tell. It's a natural limestone bridge that the Argies have unfortunately built stuff under, however it's still quite amazing to see. Until 2005 you could even walk over it and up a path to a church they also inexplicably decided to build on top, however for some reason my Spanish wasn't good enough to glean from the sign that's not on any longer.

Aconcagua is climbable by amateurs but not in a day trip, funnily enough. A guy in our hostel from Quebec was going to climb it, and told us he was going to hire a donkey to carry his stuff. The level has now been set at if a trek requires a donkey then it's probably too far for this trip. Instead we went to the national park and looked at it, after a gruelling 10 minute walk we were promised would take 45. Even with a halo of cloud it was still an impressive sight to behold. It would be a fairly standard trip to and from the lookout, but two things stand out. People must molest the ducks so regularly that there's a sign telling them not to (and funnily enough there were no ducks near the sign to be molested), and when you hear a big yelp from behind you, get off the trail. At the end of the day the cowboy dudes that hire out donkeys send all the unhired donkeys back down the trail by just setting them loose and hoping the tourists get out of the way. I guess in the A-zone it's not like you can sue them if you get trampled to death.

The final stop on the trip is a 9km winding rocky road (which sorely tested our crappy Chevy hire car) leading to the original border crossing between Chile and Argentina which was marked in 1904 after some war or other by a statue of Jesus giving the Japanese schoolgirl peace sign. The view is simply stunning into each country, and it's well worth the effort of getting up there. The only thing we found out is the climb from 2900m to 4000m you do in that 9km also means that instead of a nice 28 degrees like it was down the bottom it was a balmy 12 degrees at the top. We were both in t-shirts and shorts, which I cleverly topped off with a hoodie, which Gerry didn't even have. The pictures are mostly of us looking cold but happy.

So tonight is another nightbus, this time to Cordoba (the 'dobe) to get even more scorching heat in the Argies original colonial capital.

I'm finding the Argies a bit easier to deal with outside BA, which isn't to say they were all rude there, but people are definitely friendlier out here in the smaller cities. I guess if you had a job where you got to sleep for 4 hours in the middle of the day you'd be happier too.

Feliz ano nuevo

Buenos Aires:: Argentina

New Years Eve in BA, or how to get blood from a stone.

Places: Buenos Aires.

Coolest thing I did: Went to what would probably be the best bookshop in the world, if they had anything in English.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: There are blonde Argentinians. Heaps of them.

Even though half the town appears to have decamped to the beach to escape the heat there is still an undeniably busy vibe to Buenos Aires (BA to it's mates). We're holed up in the highly hip Palermo Hollywood district (separated by train tracks from the equally cool Palermo Soho) and you could just spend weeks just drinking coffee, eating meat and drinking wine from cafe to bar to parrilla around here - even in this slack time between Christmas and New Years there's endless options. It's also full of furniture shops that have one chair in the middle of a room made of glass and polished concrete, a sure sign that an area has been crowned as cool.

The whole town here was once meant to look like Paris, with streets of low rise buildings done in what I'm reliably informed is a Baroque style. During a resource boom starting in the 1800s and lasting until the Great Depression they then added Art Deco and Art Nouveau to the mix, and after more modern buildings done in in that every-flat-must-have-a-balcony style, only with cages all over them, I guess to stop Spiderman robbing you on the 7th or 8th floor. You look down any street and see this mix of styles running into each other, but for some reason they've resisted the urge to build proper highrise, narrow the footpaths to make more room for cars, or to break from the grid pattern (each block is numbered for 100 buildings, even if there's less than 50 on each side) making the whole thing very walkable and easy to get around. I'm promised that once you go to the poorer suburbs this all breaks down, but generally I feel like you could easily live here.

My favourite building so far has been the El Alteno bookshop, which is a converted theatre with shelves down in the old general seating and more all around the galleries. On the old stage is a cafe and people can bring stacks of books with them and sit in the opera boxes and read them. If this shop was all in English I'm sure I'd be able to waste days in there. It may be the nicest bookshop I've ever seen. This is a city that prides itself as readers, and every block seems to have at least one bookshop of some size. With the death of book retail in Australia it's a refreshing thing to see. We quite often blame our climate for making us dumb, but it's just as hot here and it doesn't seem to stop anyone reading.

My other favourite tourist site here was the La Recoleta Cemetery, which seems to be mostly an open air sculpture park. Though a lot of the themes obviously revolve around angels or the military, nearly every row you look down there's another statue begging for a photo. Like the buildings surrounding it the many artistic styles of the last 150 years are represented in each tomb, making it a kind of art history lesson. What you want to avoid is Americans talking loudly about how they are clever enough to know the difference between a Doric and Ionic column. There is a surprisingly large number of them populating the cemetery at any given time. The big draw here is the Duarte family tomb which houses the remains of Eva Peron, who was a major figure in Argentinian politics no-one in the English speaking world knows much about because she had the misfortune to have been played by Madonna in a musical movie of her life. Tragic.

If you want a different view on how people live in BA and a bit of an adrenaline hit at the same time then totally ignore the LPs advice of getting public transport to La Boca to see the Boca Juniors stadium and instead walk the streets through the projects to get there instead. There's a very sudden line between the swanky parts and the not so swanky parts of BA, and La Boca lives up to it's blue collar, docklands reputation. There's a lovely street that leads from the waterfront (which smells like an open sewer and has a nice black murky sheen) up to the Boca Juniors stadium which includes many houses painted in bring colours and an open air art gallery along the old train tracks, but veer even a street too far in either direction and it's becomes a whole lot poorer and lest touristy very quickly.

La Bombonera (the chocolate box) is the home to Club Atlético Boca Juniors, one of the world's best known football teams, and former club of the man they call God here, Diego Maradona. As you walk up from the waterfront you can see the blue and yellow terraces start to rise up over the streets and standing in front of it you can only imagine what it's like when the crowds are shoving themselves in for match day. This is home to what is considered by some the best fixture in all of world sport, the Superclasico where Boca plays cross town rivals River Plate. However, there is no chance at all of seeing it this year, due to the fact River were relegated and there will be no match-up at all for the season. Apparently it's the local derby to end all local derbies, with the whole city coming to a standstill to watch.

So the goal of being in BA at this time of year was to try and be in what is considered one of the biggest party towns in the world for New Years Eve. What we've since discovered is the Argentinians generally all leave BA and go to the beach at this time of year, and the ones that stay go to family parties, because that's what they do. Some of the younger ones go out at about 2am to the clubs but generally speaking BA starts being a ghost town about 8pm. The only way to avoid being stuck in a hostel with a lot of other drunk Aussies was to go to the internet and get tips.

At 25m high the Planetarium is the highest park in BA and we were told a place people go to have picnics and watch the fireworks. What we didn't know is pretty much no-one shows up until 11pm, so we had a whole bunch of us sitting in the pale glow of a building that's lit up like a 1968 acid trip and trying to mostly eat and drink in the dark. It was good we managed to get a group of about 8 of us, so it didn't matter so much that it was totally dead, we could make our own fun. Which if Gerry had found out about 10 mins earlier he could buy fireworks could have meant setting off our own fireworks. The guy at our hotel told him to go to the shops and just pick some up (something Australians haven't been trusted to do in years) but by the time he got there they'd cut off selling any more. This would have really helped us get into the spirit, because after midnight everyone seemed to be letting off their own fireworks pretty much everywhere - at ground level, into the sky, at eye level. Which was good, because the official fireworks being let off from the newishly redeveloped docklands were safely hidden behind a row of trees.

After we'd had our fill of drinking in the park we came back to the hotel, drank some more and then made our way down to Niceto, a fairly large club at the end of the street. The girls in our group managed to skip the 30 minute line up and get us in quickly, and in true nightclub style we found it about 50% empty when we got there (I'm a club half empty, not a club half full kind of guy), but by about 3 or 3.30am the place was starting to heave. At home I'd pretty much never have gone to a club but I had a stellar time and I suspect every one of us did.

So today I discovered New Years Day in BA is deader than disco. Even McDonnalds & Starbucks were shut. We're hoping something opens for us to get some kind of steak refill before heading off on the night bus to Mendoza and wine country tomorrow night.