Mendoza is a backpackers Mecca. The city is interesting, expertly planned out and adorned with a very low sky line with a mixture of modern and colonial architecture. Prices are extremely low and tour, food, transport and accommodation quality is high. The people are friendly. Smiles are as obvious as the clouds in the sky, they're the common currency of welcome everywhere you go and are high and wide as the massive 7000m Aconcagua only a few hours bus journey away. I fell in love with the place. Sometimes you just get a feeling! After making my windy way through the multitude of serpentine hair pins from Santiago and across the Andes I got that feeling when entering the city: wide side walks, tree-lined streets with hanging branches and oodles of cool restaurants, bars and Internet cafes. Also on show was a healthy selection of markets selling all types of handmade objects: blankets, hats, key rings, dolls, dog belts, hacky sacks, stones, face masks, the lot. The parks were very cool. Inside were soccer pitches, steam boats, marble statues and excellently tendered flower formations. And let’s not forget the cities justified reputation as having some of the most beautiful people in the world!!!
Mendoza also equals wine. Fine wine. World acclaimed wine. Melbec. I’ve decided I won’t tell you about the vineyards and the excellent conditions and techniques that they have for producing their world famous produce. To do so properly would take many hours. All I shall say is for those that like their wine I can assure you that for a strong, full bodied, oak tinted bottle of red that would do justice to a good spag bolo or a nice medium rare fillet of steak try one of Argentina’s Melbec range. I personally can recommend some of the bottles from the excellent Lopez vineyards.
Home for the 10 days in Mecca was Campo Base. The cheapest hostel I have been in on my rambling at an embarrassingly cheap 2.50 euros a night. Also the only hostel I have ever been where the have triple beds. Forget bunk beds. On these things you climb up that ladder another notch. Fortunately, I got the second bunk so the climb wasn’t too high and just about manageable at 4am in the morning after a day’s hike and a bottle of top notch vino. The place had great staff, a cool lounge and a more than adequate kitchen. Beside its mixture of tranquillity and ostensible beauty, Mendoza also offers a wide variety of adventure sports. In Campo Base they had an activity organised for everyday. On offer was (1) trekking rappelling and hot springs (2) the high mountain hike (which was a vast to Aconcagua Park and the old town bridge) (3) mountain biking and hot springs (4) vineyards tour (5) rafting (grade 3) (6) hitting the town and get absolutely hammered on Melbec wine and vodka, and (7) hitting the town and getting absolutely ossified on Melbec wine and whiskey. I tried them all with the exception of rafting as it was only a baby grade 2/3, and the mountain biking, which I had done my far share of in Bariloche.
On the sports front the best day for me was the day that myself and a very cool Australian dude called Patrick went bare hand sheer-cliff rock climbing. The type of rock climbing where you see a wiry, brave semi-clad soul setting off at the end of a mountain, harness on, hands free and a pouch of white chalk hanging from his hip. I’ve never tried it before. It was exhausting and physically very demanding but I loved it. The climbing was a grade 5-10 which s basically a mid range cliff face with average difficulty. The pros I believe do up to a grade 7 and novices like me should usually start in the 4s.
The face we attempted was a 30 metre high granite wall that ranged from between 80 degrees to 120 degrees in curvature. It had sparse hand grips and only a modicum of foots rests. It had little are no vegetation and was quite slippery. Patrick went first. He had done it before in Canada and had all his own equipment so it was a great help for me watching how he approached the cliff. We were not alone and our guide for the day was there to hold the fall rope and offer us advice in broken English and Spanish.
Climbing is a mixture of flexibility, power and cunning. It lends itself highly to problem solving, something I never appreciated until I was facing a foot-hand grip conundrum at 20 meters up. You literally have to think on your fingers not your feet! When hanging on your fingers you quickly learn how to access possible routes up or down. There s always the knowledge in the back of your head that you can at anytime give up and sit back at your ease in your harness and either have another go at a certain grip or swing to another side of the face to try another route. But there is also the knowledge that to do so is failure. While comforting knowing that the safety harness is always there, the primal animal in me, resigned itself not to use it unless absolutely necessary. The challenge for me was going as high as I could as efficiently as I could, slowly if necessary - but without assistance. To do so I visualised that I was alone, without equipment, without anyone, completely on my tod, in a must find out situation. What proved to be very helpful was I imagined that at every impasse I met, Brutos and Eusebius had been kidnapped by a heinous fiend who had taken them away from me, muzzled them, and was dangling them menacingly over the cliff head above me. Just about to throw them to their doom unless I could get to the top to rescue them. This nightmare image drove me forward and pumped the necessary adrenalin into my arteries to make thinking on my fingers a little crisper and sharper than thinking in my feet. It also gave me superhuman strength. After about 30 dogged minutes of climbing, multiple hand and foot grips and tons of contortions, screeches and reaches I met a stubborn cliff face with an impossible one hand grip to far to my left and a foot grip that a Anakin Skywalker would find hard to get to. I thought of the dogs and used all my powers to try figure out a solution. Nothing. I called on the force. Nothing. I asked the Gods for divine intervention. Nothing. After thinking for a minute or two and after careful recollecting of months of Brasilian meat and beer and a far share of Argentina wines I resigned myself to the fact that I couldn’t do it. In that resignation there was a kind of strange calm, serenity. Almost 20 metres up I felt peace on the side of a Argentinean granite face. I had tried, and tried well. But no biscuit. Not even a dog bone. I decided enough was enough. If it was my destiny not to see the dogs again until I saw them in the big white puffy kennels in the sky, so be it.
After the sheer face climbing our guide brought us to a 8 metre high suspension bridge that looked something straight out of an Indian Jones movies. Dodgy rods holding it together on each side. Really shaky and squeaky planks of wood for footing and a big copper wire to place hands. For about 10 minutes we got the chance to hang from the bridge and jump into the ice water before. We gathered quite a bit of attention from some of the passer bys. Some of which couldn’t resist taking a few snaps of us in action. It was great fun and reminded me of jumping off the rocks in the Guillemene cove, near Tramore back in Waterford, Ireland. Happy days.
