Have You Heard From Laura?

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

42k ride to Valle de la Luna

Part 1: Sunset
San Pedro de Atacama is a gringo village in the desert. There is not much to the village but gringo tour offices and gringo restaurants. Still, because we are gringos, there was plenty to do. I talked Markus and Anja, my two new Swiss friends, into biking to Valle de la Luna for sunset. We rented some good mountain bikes and set out not knowing that out and back was 42 kilometers. The ride out was clear and warm on a nice road with excellent views. Once out at the view point, good photos were pretty impossible to take, the vistas were just to huge. What looked great to us: wind and rain carved rock formations as far as the eye could see, looked like a thin dull brown line in the camera. Note to self: take a photography course. The return to San Pedro was dark and cold and quite a long ride.

Sunrise in the geyser gardin

A cosy morning in the desert of the Atacama

Part 2: Sunrise
There is not rest for the busy backpacker. Barely recovered from our LONG bike ride the day before, we were up at 4 a.m. with a van load of other gringos to drive 3 hours to see the sun rise up behind a garden of geysers. Cold doesn't describe the ride over hill and vale at 4,200 feet at 4 a.m. When we finally did arrive at the geyser garden I was only coaxed out the the van by our guide with promises of hot tea. Once the sun rose all was good and we spent the morning driving around the beautiful Atacama desert.

The Road from Heaven and on up to Hell

Road from Salta to San Pedro

Buses from Salta to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile leave only at 6 am. L I we had a big asado (BBQ) at the hostel the night before and I only got to bed at 4:30. With just 1 hour of sleep, I boarded my deluxe semi-cama sleeper bus for the 10 hour trip to San Pedro. Wow! No travelers told me how beautiful this route is. At Purmamarca we turned off the main highway and onto a newly paved road for a windy trip over the Andes to Chile. By far the most beautiful high desert scenery I’ve ever seen. Huge vistas of mountains, salt lakes, shallow rivers, guanaco (the local deer), horses, mules and cattle grazing in the multicolored mountains.

We went up and up and up for hours and hours and hours and the trip just wouldn’t end. We were winding in and out of mountain passes at about 14,000 feet. I suffered two headaches that felt as thick as the mountains we passed. One from excess wine the night before and the other from altitude. I really had to pee but the bathroom was occupied for hours by people getting sick from the altitude. What began as the most beautiful ride of my life turned to the ride from hell. At about 4 pm we arrived at Argentine customs. It took 2 hours to process our bus. The elevation was taking it’s toll. One woman suffering terribly from the altitude was given oxygen. After two hours standing around in Argentine immigration we piled back into the bus for more off-roading through no mans land between Argentina and Chile. The landscape was even more beautiful but I just couldn’t keep my eyes open – I felt like shit. FINALLY we arrived at Chilean immigration which also turned out to be the town of San Pedro, yeah! I was one of the first to be processed and then I walked the rest of the way to town with two new Swiss friends. We found a really shit hostel, took several asprin and went to bed.

La Peña

Last night I returned to La Casona del Molino. It's a peña here in Salta (north western Argentina). A peña is a restaurant where local Argentinians sing and jam out folk music on guitar, sometimes accompanied by percussion or maybe a wooden flute. La Casona has great atmosphere. It's a rustic place with simple dark wood furniture. Following the traditional style, there are a few rooms surrounding a central courtyard. La Casona serves food from northwestern Argentina. Of course this includes empanadas. Where would Argentina be without their empanadas? Other starters are tamals (very similar to Mexican tamales) and humitas (sweet tamals with fresh corn but without the meat center). For entrees there is of course asado (fantastic slow grilled meats). Around here they are also big on stews served in clay bowls. Locro is a stew of mixed meats, potatoes and beans. My favorite has been Casuela cabrilito, a stew of baby goat with potatos and vegetables.

So the scene is like this. You turn up around 11 or 11:30 p.m. and order local wine (Cafayate is the local wine region) and a meal. Sooner or more likely much later, the regulars turn up with their guitars and handwritten lyric books. Particularly cool are the guys wearing black felt sombreros or wool berets. After these guys have chewed quite enough coco leaves and put back plenty of cervesa and vino they break out the instruments and the song books and start jaming. It's not a performance. They don't get paid and they don't play a set. Rather then drink and talk and hang out and occasionally sing and play their folk songs beautifully.

Around Salta

Salta must be the loveliest city in all of Argentina. In northern Argentina, Salta enjoys a warm climate and green green GREEN mountains all around. The thing to do here is get in a car and drive around the country side. Nicole (Seattle) and I hired a little white chevy for 5 days and SURPRISE, it was standard shift so I, of course, was relieved of driving duty (sorry Nicole).

Nicole and the Chevy in Parque Nacional de los Cardones

Giant cardones en route to Cachi

First stop the town of Cachi. En route to Cachi, as we climbed and climbed the green mountains gave way to Cactus forests. So beautiful and so much like parts of the south western U.S. In fact, Nicole and I couldn’t stop talking about the similarities to southern Utah and the Four Corners. Cachi but is a great little Spanish colonial town and is remarkable clean, even the gutters in the street are spotless. For dinner we enjoyed great local food (empanadas, ,humitas, caseras) and drank bad wine from a box. In our hostel the furniture was made of cactus wood. A parrot hung out in the courtyard eating grapes from a big old grape vine.

Day 2 we drove (Nicole drove, I sat) all day on windy dirt roads through dry rural areas to Cafayate. The only dwelings we passed were simple mud brick constructions. The people around here look to be so poor. Sometimes I feel like such a spoiled and naïve American. We picked up an old guy hitchhiking and he made a short prayer when I got in the back seat.

Quebrada de Cafayate

Amphitheater along Quebrada de Cafayate

Late in the afternoon we arrived in Cafayate which is famous for it’s wine. We stopped in a winery highly recommended by Lonely Planet. Our guide was a strange and rather afeminate man who makes me think of that Martin short character from the first Beverly Hills Cop movie, except this guy had very fuzzy teeth. Yuck. And the wine was quite poor. Thanks Lonely Planet. Cafayate wasn’t so remarkable but the road north from Cafayate, certainly is. Route 68, the Quebrada de Cafayate, winds through dramatic Utah like scenery. Pink and red mountains carved by wind and water. Think Arches and Canyonlands. We stopped for the night in San Salvadore de Jujuy. The most redeeming thing about Jujuy us the restaurant Route 9. Route 9 is full of locals eating yummy local dishes like such as lamb or chicken stew.

North of Jujuy, we drove through the little towns of Purmamarca and Tilacara and spent the night in Humahuaca. Great scenery the entire time.

Wine Tasting in Mendoza

Vines at La Rural

Barrels at Escorihuela

It’s late in the season and the rain that has followed me from San Martin to Pucon and now here to Mendoza seems to be urging me northward to Bolivia. I can´t miss a stop in Mendoza before heading north. Mendoza is located in western Argentina, just east of the Andes, not far from Santiago. Mendoza is famous for Aconcaugua, the highest peak in South America – maybe it’s the second highest in the world. Mendoza is also famous for wine. The climate around here is dry but a lot of water runs down from the Andes and this makes the vines happy. Winery tours are the thing to do here – and are a great answer to a rainy day. Wine making is pretty complex. I find that with each tour I pick up a couple of new things. The wine and the tour at La Rural didn´t impress me much but they have a really interesting wine making museum with old winemaking equipment on display. Another day I visited Escorihuela. My small group was shown around by Silvina who showed us everything from crushing to barreling to bottling. The engineer in me is fascinated with the fermentation processes and the automation – what a geek! The foodie in me really enjoyed the wine at Escorihuela. We tried a syrah-malbec blend that was super fruity – just the way I like my vino tinto. In the States, Escorihuela is sold as Gascon – look for it. Since the devaluation of the Argentinian peso 3 years ago, I figure these wines are very good values.

Friends at home be on the lookout for these imports from Argentina: Don David, Gascon, San Filipe (Chardonay), Flichman.

Providencia, Santiago

Happy Easter!

Here in Santaigo I’m staying with Macarena who I met in Nepal a year or two ago. Santiago is famous for it’s smog and with good reason. One of the main tourist attractions is to walk or cable car your way up to Cerro San Christobal for a view of massive Santiago and the surrounding mountains. I’m not sure why they want to send the tourist up there because mostly what you see from this mountain is the smog over Santiago. Note to self: invest in the natural gas industry in Chile. At some point these people are going to have to deal with their air pollution.

Macarena lives with her mother and sister in Providencia, Santiago (read: the nice part). Providencia is the clean part with wide streets and beautiful homes and plenty of western businesses. Macarena is hilarious and full of spunk as is her friend Daniela. Maca and her mom and sister are close. Here at a REAL HOME I’m thoroughly enjoying my own bedroom room and bath. Lunch is the main meal of the day and begins out back with pisco sours in the beautiful garden. Funny thing, here I am, finally connecting with some regular Chileans and what we do doesn´t seem so foreign. We´ve been to bars that would easily fit in Manhattan, we been to gigantic shopping malls with Calvin Klein and Esprit shops, we´ve eaten sushi and had chai latte at Starbucks. (Friends from the CA, sorry about the non p.c. stop at Starbucks, I couldn´t resist). BTW, we went to see Monster with Charliz Theron and were just so struck by the sad story and the amazing performances. Maca, Dany and I have been talking about this film for days.

Lago Verde Trail, Parque Nacional Huerquehue, Pucon

Monkey Puzzle Tree

Big Old Monkey Puzzle

Day 2 in Pucon. No sun in the forcast. I trekked in Parque Huerquehue for the day, where the were no views of the volcano but plenty of water falls, slippery muddy trails and think deep green moss growing on big trees – a perfect day for hugging trees. The forest was mostly beech but higher up we found lakes and the famous Monkey-puzzle trees. Monkey-puzzle trees (Araucanria araucana, pehuen in Spanish) are some kind of remnant from before the glaciers. They look terrifically prehistoric – a early version of conifer perhaps, they look like a cross between a palm and an evergreen. The bark on the older trees is super thick and shape like puzzle pieces and all cover in Spanish moss. It was just too cold and wet that day so we hiked back toward the trailhead and spent the remainder of the afternoon in Refugio Tranquilo. This refugio is the most beautiful. As we sat by the cast iron stove sipping fresh mint tea and eating apple tart I considered asking for the blueprints so that I could duplicate this building at home. Refugio Tranquilo, don`t miss it.