Snakes, Spiders, Fluffy Kittens...

Salta is a city in the North of Argentina that is surrounded by many different strange natural wonders, like salt flats, cloud forests, deserts, and rumpsteak. The city buzzes with activity, and the sidewalks are very narrow and riddled with schoolchildren and piles of rubble. The schoolchildren feed on the piles of rubble, but only nocturnally.

After settling in to a hotel close to the plaza, we took a walk up the hill which is about a 10 minute walk from the hotel, called Cerro San Bernardo. At this latitude (about S 25 degrees) things are starting to get warmer and junglier in parts. This means deadly animals. The first large message we received from Pachamama to this effect was the uninterrupted canopy of giant spiderwebs (and accompanying giant spiders) during the walk to the top of the hill.

We had a short guided tour of the jungle by a very nice guy named Raoul, who explained that there are only three really deadly snake species available for use in the area. Rattlesnakes (Jarara), Coral snakes, and Deadly Green Snakes Without Clear English Counterpart (Urutu). Deadly spiders can also be encountered. More on both of these later.

We saw posters all over town... it looked like Queen was playing Friday night. So that was obviously an opportunity that couldn't be missed. We bought tickets, put leftover gin in a Nalgene bottle, and wandered into the auditorium.

It would be unfair to expect an all-around successful imitation of Freddy Mercury. But this guy had the looks (sort of... add about 50 pounds of weird gym muscle), and the "look at me all the time" disease. It was, of course, the music that suffered. But once or twice, after a lot of gin, when the lights were low and the crowd was excited, we truly believed that we were watching Queen.

There were a couple of unforgettable lyrics problems:
1) "WE WON'T, WE WON'T.... ROCK YOU...."
2) "WE ARE THE CHAMPGNONS, MY FRIENDS..."

Our first out-of-town adventure was to THE CLOUD FORESTS OF SAN LORENZO. For the first time we had to hire a guide for a mutli-day hike because the region has no maps, and because the land is mostly private. We inquired after the availability of Lando Calrissian, but he was on vacation. The guy we settled for, Rafael, met us at the trailhead at 10AM and we set out on a three-day adventure into the hills.

Rafael, who is the same age as Jen (12), was born and raised in San Lorenzo, and he has built up a relationship with the farmers that live in the valleys in the cloud forests during his time exploring and guiding. He is basically the only guy who leads treks in the region, so we felt very lucky to be doing it.

There was also a French guy who came along, named Xavier. He is a cameraman, but it's the off-season, so there he was, with us in the cloud forests. He was a very nice, funny, and relaxed guy who was a pleasure to share the experience with.

So the cloud forest is just like it sounds. You are either in clouds, looking down on clouds, or looking across valleys at clouds. At moments the forest felt enchanted and old... then the clouds would blow off and the mood would totally change. Pictures don't really do it justice, but have a look anyway.

We made close friends with cows during the hike, and camped with their waste. Cow patties are actually really clean though, I hope, right? Yeah. By the end of the trip I was using cow patties to store cooking utensils, support reading material, and as a cumin substitute.

Other highlights were chicken-squeezing contests, and getting a chance to rest for a while and hang out with some of the farmers in the remote valleys. They have lived on these farms for generations. Their homes are very simple, but they have everything they need to live efficiently and without want of goat cheese. We had a chance to taste some of the goat cheese, and it was incredible... The real deal... Full of flavours that get boiled, beaten, or otherwise factory-filtered out of North American goats and their cheeses.

On the last day of hiking Jen had a very special moment. The order of hiking was Rafa-Xavi-Jen-Neil. For the sake of reference, I will now introduce a spot on the trail which I will call Spot X. Rafa and Xavi cleared Spot X without incident. Jen approached Spot X, stopped, pointed, and screamed for her life with four or five short bursts of utterly terror-filled shrieking.

So the rest of us stopped and looked down at her feet just in time to see the tail of a meter-long snake disappear into the jungle. But it had left a bloodied rat for us on Spot X - proof that we weren't just imagining things. Jen says that the other two guys just stepped over the coiled snake as though it was a cow patty, not seeing it for what it was. By the time she had reached Spot X, the snake was freaked out a bit and decided to leave its kill for later (or maybe never).

The tragedy here is that I love snakes - the deadlier the better - and Jen doesn't. There was so much savage beauty there to be enjoyed (or screamed at, or whatever). The only savage beauty I got out of the deal was the dead rat. They are totally boring.

Back to Salta, and another week of working and walking around town. Salta is really nice. Jen likes it very much because of all the Gauchitude...

Our last weekend before leaving town we spent driving a circuit south of the city which passes through some incredible scenic ravines and valleys, and the towns of Cafayate and Cachi. We camped for three nights in municipal campgrounds/stockyards. Roosters are included - no continental breakfast.

We picked up our VW Gol on Friday afternoon. This is not a typo. The VW S.A. marketing forces have decided that it would be excessive use of plastic to include the "f" in "Golf". Really I think the explanation is that VW S.A. feared that using the name "Golf", which has achieved great purchase in Argentina as the brand name of a mixture of mustard and mayo, would cause consumers to mistake their cars for a pale-yellow condiment. On with the story...

We drove south through incredible red eroded rock formations to a place called Cafayate, famous for its white wine (Torrontés, the grape is called). We set up at what we thought was a military base campground (because of the military Land Cruiser in the parking lot), and woke up the next day eager to start a hike up to some 10m waterfalls hidden in a ravine. The walk in was amazing. The trail was not very well marked, so we felt a genuine sense of adventure finding the safest route up the river. This hike will stand out as one of my favourites I think, owing mainly to that sense of adventure.

We found the falls at last, and we were the only ones there. The water was painfully cold, but I was determined to stand under the waterfalls, just like the beautiful girls in the brochures, so out I went. The total body pain was one thing, then you get water pounding into the back of your head from 10m... That night I thought I was catching the flu, but in retrospect I think it was my body telling me never ever to do that kind of thing again.

We hiked back down and began the drive north to Cachi. This drive was very dry and lunar, with cactus forests lining the road. We decided to stop short of Cachi in a place called Molinos, because we were running out of daylight. We stayed in another campground/military base, easy to find because of the Land Cruiser parked out front... but on closer inspection I realized that this Land Cruiser had a Swiss ID sticker on the back!!! Hold on... So it turned out to be the same vehicle that we had seen the night before in Cafayate that had made us think it was a military base!

We caught up with the owners of the vehicle, a really nice Swiss couple named Claude and Erika, and part of their long and very rich story. The vehicle was a motorhome conversion of a 1997 Land Cruiser pickup truck built custom by a firm in Germany, and shipped across the Altantic into the port of Buenos Aires. The entire power system was run on diesel, including cooking, water heating, and space heating. This was not the first trip for them in their beautiful motorhome... they had been back and forth from Europe to Asia several times, and this was the beginning of what will be a 5ish-year tour of the Americas. Anyway, we had a couple of great conversations with them, and we reminisced about Yukon with Aaron and his Class-C Dodge Sportsman a couple of years ago.

The next day's drive from Cachi to Chicoana (very close to Salta) saw the scenery change abruptly, again. We started out in dry cactus forests, then up and over a high pass (3700m) into green hills and grasses covering red rocky outcroppings. Bird life here was amazing... Then back into cloud forests as we got closer Chicoana.

During the drive we zinged over something hairy and eight-legged. Ha! Savage beauty, here we come! I pulled over, grabbed the camera, and yes, we spent some time with a Tarantula in the wild. Wow. Hairy. Being so far from its crypt, or whatever they live in, it was probably going to the hairdresser's.

Now on to Chile. As in, Voodoo Chile.

My First Bribe...

First things first, for diehard fans of neilandjen.blogspot.com, check out jenandneil.blogspot.com! Hang on to your seats... I was very excited to post photos of my tiara here, but I have been beaten to the punch. Special thanks to Amanda Z. for finding this weirdly symmetric internet gem.

In preparation for the arrival of my parents, Barb and Syd, we arrived a day early in Mendoza to make sure the city was in peak form. After a night in a hostel, picking up the rental Peugeot 206 Diesel, and checking in to our rental apartment, we went out the airport to pick them up. And there they were! After some grocery shopping (like, wine shopping, and some crackers), we ate a light dinner (like, wine and crackers) and had a beautiful night of catching up and airing family laundry. Poor Jen. And this was only the first night... she thought cousin Jerry was weird... wait 'til we start talking about uncle Toby's duck problem.

Our apartment was in a neighbourhood south of the main city grid called Bombal. The city itself has the appearance of being quite modern, because it was totally levelled by an earthquake early in the 20th century, and most solid buildings following that were low-slung art-deco style buildings. Roads in the city are lined with aqueducts called acequias that are used to irrigate the city, feeding the mature trees that are all over the city.

Acequias come in all shapes and sizes, and all degrees of difficulty. Some would merely cause you to break your knee if you were to fall in them; some would break both legs and result in death by cayman. They were the primary source of stress during my parents' visit, and coupled with rabid local traffic, they made crossing the street quite an adventure at times.

We didn't waste too much time in starting the wine touring. Our first victim was the Familia Zuccardi winery about 30km east of the city of Mendoza. We started out from the apartment, and were doing fine until a police officer waved us over to the side of the road. I had made an illegal left turn, which I thought was a very minor infraction in comparison to the local habit of screaming through red lights at night with the headlights turned of. At any rate, there we were, face to face with Argentine police.

We had discussed strategies concerning what to do after being pulled over with some friends in Bariloche, so I set one of the plans into action: Act stupider than I actually am, which is pretty stupid. So I pretended not to know a single word of Spanish, which is not really a far cry from the 7 words I actually do know.

This strategy did two things: 1) It made me sweat a great deal, and 2) it made the cop go back and get a more senior guy who knew better English, and who knew about more interesting channels in the local justice system. This guy explained again that I owed $550 ARS ($220 CDN), and that my license would be held at a local bank until the following Monday (the day being Friday). To this I responded, with a friendly and understanding tone: "I'm sorry that I did that. I won't do it again. Can we just forget that this ever happened?"

What I really meant was: "I thought you guys were supposed to be corrupt! Can't I just give you cash? What kind of corrupt police force are you?"

He asked me to get out of the car.

Like a star quarterback and wide receiver crouched in the huddle, I watched him draw a play on his ticket pad explaining that, since I didn't need a receipt, and I didn't have the cash to pay the entire $550 ticket, I could give him $50 USD! Touchdown! He circled the $50 USD on his diagram emphatically.

I went back to the car, got the cash, paid up, got my license, and thanked him. Then, finally, we were on our way.

The Familia Zuccardi winery was a very nice, new, fairly industrial, no-nonsense place with tons of stainless steel everywhere. This was our first winery, so the details of the process hadn't quite firmed up in our minds. We tasted some experimental wines straight from huge stainless tanks, saw the aging room, full of hundreds of French and American oak casks (new, worth about $1000 Euro), then made our way to the restaurant for lunch. Tons of meat for lunch. My father can eat way more meat than I can. By a factor of at least two.

The next cool out-of-town trip was to the Andes, mostly to see the region around Aconcagua, the western hemisphere's highest peak! The drive out there took about 3 hours, and snaked through foothills, then multi-coloured sedimentary mountains (if that even makes sense), then the really ridiculously high peaks. We went for a little hour-long hike near the park station at a trailhead to the base camps further down the valley, and saw some great views of the area. The peak of Aconcagua itself had a puffy white cloud perched on it for the duration of our visit, but we got the idea. It was majorly huge.

We emptied the fridge that night, having a nice bunch of eggs and tons of wine for dinner, and prepared for the next thing on the agenda, which was a full day of wine touring starting bright and early at 9:30AM.

We got a bit lost on the way to the Catena Zapata winery, which was supposedly put in an awkward place to prevent ¨just anyone¨from stumbling by and enjoying it. This was a poor excuse for bad signage and poorly maintained gravel roads.

The winery itself was an ostentatious Mayan temple-like building surrounded perfectly symmetrically by vineyards. It was very eerie. The owner, Mad Dr. Something or Other, must be very weird. I´m sure ritual sacrifice goes on there. Our statuesque tour guide had the weirdest haircut I have ever seen. Bangs cut perfectly straight at the height of her pupils. The whole thing was very surreal. Our misgivings were softened considerably after a couple of glasses of wine. It was still only about 10:30 in the morning.

The next winery was the overall winner. Achaval-Ferrer, it was called. It featured a great tour, which was much more scientific than the others, in which we first tasted the component wines of a blended wine, then tasted the blended wine during aging, then at last tasted the final product. That was fun. They gave us more wine than any other place, to the point where we actually had to dump out the odd bit between selections! Who would have thought... Dad was especially traumatized.

We enjoyed a beautiful lunch at a place called La Bourgogne before the third and final tour-tasting of the day, for which we were all mostly braindead (see photo at right). It was at a place called Vistalba, in Luján de Cuyo. We really didn´t care how unique their concrete tank surface was, or how their grapes were harvested only by left-handed orphans, etc. We even refused the tasting. But we felt obliged to buy a bottle of their wine.

One interesting overarching theme of Mendoza was THE QUEST TO FULFILL ANDY´S LEATHER PANT FANTASY. Jen and I spent hours explaining my brother Andy´s unique physique to leather pant store operators, who would in turn describe how perfectly their pants would fit him, and how good he would look walking down the street in Canada wearing his leather pants. I was forced to try on about six pairs of too short, too fat leather pants. It was a spine-chilling experience. The final conclusion was THIS WORLD DOES NOT WANT ANDY TO WEAR LEATHER PANTS.

One great highlight of the visit was an evening watching Tango! We found a really great show put on by a group called Tango Fuerza from Buenos Aires, featuring truly astounding musicians and classically trained dancers. Dad was absolutely transfixed by the Bandoneón and its music, which led to many great discussions throughout the rest of the trip about how best to locate and buy a Bandoneón in Canada, or whether we´d have to buy a kit and build our own, and the probable trips to Toronto for lessons from strange Argentine expats; in the end, a fairly detailed mythology was built up surrounding Dad´s fantastic Bandoneón journey.

For days after the Tango show we´d be watching soccer or BBC news or whatever, and Dad would pipe up: "Check channel 73!" This was up in the forbidden region of home-shopping and cable signal stregth channels, but in their midst he had found a 24-hour Tango channel! I´d flip to channel 73, but more often than not he had already seen whatever was playing (usually Astor Piazzolla wearing metallic purple pants playing funked-out Tango in the 70´s). So I think that, in only a couple of days, he had seen every program that was on rotation on the Tango channel... True dedication to the artform.

Our last two days were spent in unbelievable luxury at a resort south of Mendoza called Finca Adalgisa (or Analgesia, as we came to call it). It was a wonderful place made up of about three acres of vineyards surrounding a swimming pool and lawnchairs. People who worked there would drift by and ask if you wanted anything. Jen learned about ordering espressos from the poolside while knitting, and the rest of us read and lounged and talked. There were cats who would occasionally walk by for a scratch, and a little bodega hidden in the vineyard where we went for wine each day at around 6PM. This was a real highlight of our time in Mendoza, and will probably stand out as the most luxurious portion of our South American adventures... made possible in part by the fine tastes of my parents.

Unfortunately, they went home last week. We followed them to the airport in the Peugeot, and bid them a tearful hasta luego in the security line. They flew to Santiago, Chile, had an 8 hour layover, and arrived safely back home the following morning.

We came crashing back down to earth that night, checking in to a hostel and eating popcorn for dinner. Next stop, Salta! It´s the name of a city in the far north of Argentina, not topping for our popcorn dinner.