Climbing Volcan Villarricca
From Bariloche it was back over the Andes, on a rather spectacular drive (if you ignore the ash on everything) to Pucon in Chile. In the summer Pucon is a lakeside resort (with some great restaurants) but at this time of year its main attraction is walking up Volcan Villarricca. It's an active volcano and from the garden of the hostel you could see the smoke rising from its summit.
They collected us from the hostel at 7am. Though the weather looked pretty grim, heavy cloud, more like fog. We drove into the national park and the path started to wind up. We soon broke above the cloud and continued to wind up the hillside. The trees stopped and it soon felt like you were on the side of a volcano. We were kitted out with ice axes and crampons but we didn't need those to begin with. It was a steady trudge up. We had about 1500m of climbing to do. My calfs were burning after about 45mins. The views were spectacular, the volcano was clearly visible above us and down in the valley there was cloud punctuated with other surrounding hills, and other volcanoes in the distance.
At the bottom of the first field of ice (about a third of the way up) all the groups seem to be congregating. It was pretty windy. You could see some of the guides had climbed to the top and were leaning into the wind. They said it was too windy to go up at the moment so we sat in the warm sunshine and freezing cold wind for about 30mins to see what the weather would do...30mins later it was still doing the same. We weren't allowed to go any higher with this wind. We weren't going to make it to the top. The way down was straight down the scree, surfing and sliding down, in less than half the time than on the way up (a different route down).
Santiago and Valpo
From Pucon we continued up through Chile to the capital Santiago. The main Santiago attraction is its pre-Columbian museum but that was closed for renovations. We got the bus out to Valpo (Valparaiso) on the coast. Valpo used to be one of the main trading ports on the west coast of South America. The hills soon rise up from the coast leaving only a small strip of flat land by the coast for the port. The houses tumble down the hills. Each suburb had its own 'ascensor', furnicular railway, costing about 25 pence each way. More fun that that is the town penchant for painting the houses in bright colours and their love of street art. 20 years ago in Valpo they had an 'open air museum' of modern street graffiti but now there's amazing paintings all over the town.
For lunch we had the local speciality: chorrillana, a mountain of fries (probably cooked with some meat fat because they tased so good), with fried meat (some bits of steak, sausage, and dodgy frankfurter sausages), with fried egg and fried onions, topped with a piece of melted cheese. It took several days to recover from such a heart attack on a plate. The restaurant we were in had pleny of locals and they were all having the same as us. It was quite a change from the very nice fish meal we'd had at the end of the Drago trip.
Mendoza
From Santiago it was back into Argentia to Mendoza, the heart of the Malbec wine growing region. We did a cycle wine tour of three wineries. Two boutique wineries and one big operation. The first winery were happy to sell their wine 'unbranded', so the buyer could specify their own label. The wine they sold in Texas was branded "nice"! The last winery didn't really go in for wine tastings...they just gave you a glass full, if you could finish it off and wanted try another you were more than welcome. It's harvest season so the vineyards were busy with piles of grape, a skip full of grape skin and pith and industrial hoses moving the grapes juice/wine from one vat to another.
Ischigualasto National Park - The valley of the moon
We were keen to avoid the 18 hour bus trip from Mendoza to Salta. There must be something worthwhile in between... the guide book mentioned a couple of national parks with the vague promise that it was possible to get there on the buses. There was a hostel in the town so other people must make it up there. The address for the hostel didn't really make much sense, it sounded like a cross roads but google maps showed the town as a name (San Agustin Valle de Fertil) on a single road in the middle of nowhere. We had to get 2 buses, and only 3 a day to the little town where we were greeted at the bus station by people from the hostel. The town was bigger than we expected, maybe 10 blocks by 10 and had all mod-cons: supermarket, empanada shop, ATM, pizza restaurant, dinosaur themed ice cream shop.
The national park was still an hour away from the town. The town was flat, green and scrubby, the national park was bleak, desert like. There were canyons of multi coloured rocks, greys, oranges, purples. One side of the park there was a bright red cliff, 100+metres high. Time and wind had sculpted some strange landscapes and formations across the park. It was here that they found some of the oldest, and best preserved dinosaurs ever found. At a number of the stop points they just found fossilised plants in the rocks, though I think they have found all the easy to find dinosaours now. Phil took lots of photos.
In the evening they organised a BBQ at the hostel garden cooked by the 'Dad' with a rather impressive moustache. The BBQs here are 2m by 1m fire pits, with a proper chimney. They BBQ the sort of beef joints we'd have for Sunday dinner. They're covered in salt, sealed on the heat then the cut meat from the bottom and put it back on the heat for the next slice to cut through. After dinner one of the hostels tour drivers came back with a couple of guitars and a selection of other Argentian instruments (including pan pipes). He played and sung for us for hours. There were other Argentinian tourists in the hostel and they all sang the traditional folk songs, as well as some pop hits. When they started on La Bamba it seemed like the right time to go to bed.
We went to another less famous park too where the guide tried to name all the formations you could/couldn't see in the shapes of the rock: the face of the gaucho, the parrot, the gaucho on the horse, however I have to admit the turtle did actually look like a turtle (a formation along the top of the canyon).
After the tour we were left at a road house to pick up the next bus to La Rioja and the next connecting bus to Salta, where we've admired the colonial architecture and done a bit of relaxing (its Palm Sunday so the only activity available today was going to church). Tomorrow we're off to San Pedro de Atacama (Atacama desert) then the salt flats of Bolivia.
