24/09/2016: We’ve been doing holiday for nearly two months and if I didn't know any better, if I couldn't remember LifePreTrip, I think I could be convinced I've been living out of a 16-litre back pack since the dawn of time (and 16 litres of clothes isn’t that much). I imagined it would get tiring: wearing the same stinky clothes every day, packing up only to realise I've left the corkscrew at the bottom of my bag and it's wine time, not having a real home. But in reality there are laundries, we didn't bring a corkscrew and so it's never lost (or is it permanently lost?) and rather than not having a real home we have lots of temporary homes. We're currently sat on a sofa, drinking coffee. I’ve just eaten cake and Pól is nose-deep in a bag of ketchup flavour crisps; we could be back in Madrid were it not for the sound of the seagulls, the expensive sofa under our gluttonous behinds, and the fact that tomorrow we're going to take a ninety-minute bus ride to Valparaiso in Chile, which you can't do from any point in Spain, not even Cadiz.
Sandwiched between two Chile visits, we spent ten days in what we've (unfairly) come to think of as “shit Europe”: Argentina. “Europe” because everything is so familiar, “shit” because it's not quite right. Kind of like the characters in the Polar Express; they look human enough to fool you from a distance, but up close were actually a bit creepy.
Despite this (I repeat, unfair) label, we had a great time in shit Europe. It began on top of a mountain. The Chile-Argentina border on the road between San Pedro and Salta actually lies considerably to the west of the Andes, but minutes after passport control I was fast asleep, having given Pól instructions to wake me up when there was some good scenery. The problem with this trip is that it's desensitising us to incredible views: I worry that scenes which should leave me breathless will soon only provoke vague interest, perhaps a 5-second glance before I nod off again. Who am I kidding? It's already happened.That journey presented us with vertigo-inducing view of the road below after vertigo-inducing view of the road below, and we drove past and got a good view of a mountain called “the 7-coloured mountain” because of its, guess. True to form, the air conditioning failed and I added the SweatBus of Argentina to my list. We arrived in Salta after dark, ate some delicious nachos, and went to bed. When we’d been in Puerto Iguazú, deciding to spend less time in Argentina and more time in Bolivia, we’d met a guy who was from Salta and who had urged us to go to his home city. He was in PI on a business trip (his business being stocking up on tax-free digitalware in Ciudad del Este before flogging it back home). He wore a baseball cap with the protective sticker still on the peak in what I'm guessing is the style of a modern-day pirate. I kept my eyes peeled for him while we were in Salta, to no avail. Maybe he'd been arrested. Apart from an only slightly not boring cable car to the top of a quite boring mountain, we found Salta a bit boring. Thanks to a religious festival bringing the whole city onto the streets singing about spirits and crying, it took us an hour and a half to find a cash point which would give us some of our money. We also ate the worst pasta we’d ever tasted. Actually, that's not true; the “cannelloni” was actually made of pancake. Pancake is not pasta. Pancake is not a vegetable either (a reminder to the Spanish colleague who asked me once if pancake was a fruit or a vegetable: she was mispronouncing “pumpkin”). So we caught the next bus south to a small town called Cafayate (pronounced in Argentinian “Cafashattay”).
Naturally, the journey was incredible. The bus took us past mountains that were impressive not for their size, #sizedoesntmatter, but for the fact that they somehow looked prehistoric. I understand that may sound banal; the answer to “how old is that mountain?” is, I think, never not “very, very, very”, but these particular mountains had a real look of dinosaur times about them. For the last 50km or so before reaching reaching Cafashattay, the road runs through a gorge (La Quebrada De Las Conchas) which has natural formations dotted along the edge which have acquired names and carparks and tortilla stands. The next day we took the bus back up to one of these rocky wonders (the Devil's Throat II : this one's not a waterfall) and then hitched our way back via the toad (toad-shaped rock), the monk (monk-shaped rock) and the amphitheatre (amphitheatre-shaped lack of rock). We had been adopted by a German couple in Salta and they had travelled with us to Cafashattay and took care of us through our hitch-hiking debut, making sure only the non-murderous drivers pulled over and let us hop (clamber, with great difficulty) onto the back of their pickup. Bouncing along on the back of those vans with the wind in my eyes and my ears so it was quite hard to see and impossible to hear anything apart from the road under the tyres, clinging to the sides at every bend so as not to slide across and get a little too close to a German I didn't know well enough for hugs was some of the most fun I've ever had. Even Captain Safety agreed, and he moans at the lack of seatbelts on buses and when bunkbeds are a bit too high. It also made us feel pretty cool.
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| Stefan and Theresia. Canine buddies. |
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| Mona and Big Red. German buddies. |
From Cafashattay we also visited a couple of bodegas and did some very cheap wine tasting (it's free if you buy a bottle of wine after the tasting, so it was free) and did some grilling of vegetables on the barbecue in the hostel garden. To accompany our flesh-free feast we went quarters on a 4.65 litre bottle of wine, known locally as a Dama Juana, which cost us about 7€ and our memory of the evening. We also accidentally adopted some street dogs who accompanied us on our walks and danderings around town: Mona, Big Red and Patrick were experts at sneaking into hostels and gave us unconditional love in exchange for a few ear rubs, much like us with the Germans.
We were sad to leave Cafayate and our new friends (human and canine) and head off to Mendoza after four (relatively expensive) nights, but my overzealous use of hostelworld back in February meant we had a schedule to keep. We were even sadder to leave Cafayate when we got to Mendoza and found, as a big city (fourth largest in Argentina), it didn't have the small-town, wild-west, friendly-neighbour feeling of our last home, and there were no dogs to be seen.
We did very little in Mendoza. I went for a walk, we both went for an ice cream, and Pól spent 12 hours on the phone to UKmail trying and failing to find out why they hadn't delivered the replacement for his broken tablet which Google had sent him to my parents’ house. The reason: because they're incompetent ballbags who couldn't draw a picture of a penguin if they were given paper, pencil, a well-behaved penguin model and a picture of the penguin which they could just lie and say they’d done. Why? Because they're stupid. But anyways, we’re trying not to think about it, or let our inability to watch films or series on long journeys get us down #podcastsaregoodtoo as the stress has given Pól a bad knee (he may have a pre-existing condition, I'm not sure).
After four (relatively cheap) nights, a trip to another bodega and 14 trips to the local Carrefour we caught the 08:30 bus back across the Andes for yet another jaw-dropping journey (these mountains were not only huge #remembersizedoesntmatter, they were snowy and ski-slopey and craggy and imposing) out of shit Europe and back to Chile.
In the end we really enjoyed our time in Argentina: the country (in our experience) of hitch-hiking, almost-5-litre bottles of wine, incredible rock formations (like in Disney's Up) and friendly dogs (like in Disney's Up). Shit Europe is, essentially, way more awesome than Normal Europe.
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