¨Punching Out,¨ or, ¨How the Authors Hatched an Ingenious Plan¨

Following a latenight strategy session, we think we´ve hit on a plan for our last week together. It goes a little something like this:

We are indeed stranded in the purgatorio of Tupiza for another day, but at 7:00 tomorrow morning we´ll climb aboard a 4×4 for a private guided tour of half the southwest circuit. And because we´re creating our own itinerary (for a small premium), we´ll have hours and hours to hike and explore in the places we´re stopping, as opposed to the standard 15 minutes that most tour companies offer. The genius of the plan is that midway through the circuit, at the sourthernmost point, we´ll actually exit Bolivia for Chile. That´s right, we´re punching out. So we´ll miss the Salar de Uyuni, that enormous, mesmerizing, pure white salt flat, as well as the rainforest visit we´d already booked in the north. Not to mention La Paz, Lake Titicaca (seriously, that´s its name), etc.

What we´ve realized is that because Bolivia is dirt cheap and has this mystique of rugged adventure-seeking, all of the routes we´ve found ourselves looking into are choked with young European backpackers who fancy themselves latter-day Edmund Hillarys. The great irony, of course, is that they all have the exact same itinerary, all talk about the same spots ¨you just have to visit,¨ just follow each other around like bipedal sheep with pounds and euros jangling in their pockets, checking the country´s sites off their lists as one would check off picking up the dry cleaning or ordering new checks at the bank. I don´t mean to underestimate the sheer joy the common backpacker-animal must experience in his or her wanderings, but wherever there are backpackers there are jaded locals, bad hotels/hostels, expensive and inflexible package tours, and the list goes on. We think back to Argentina, to our time hiking in the high desert above Barreal where the silence is absolute, the solitude immense, and we simply cannot abide the idea of following millions of human footprints for the next week.

If we had but world enough and time, I have no doubt that we would discover a Bolivia that would rival Argentina and Brazil in sheer wonder and beauty, but that discovery will simply have to wait. Perhaps in a decade or so Bolivia will no longer be fashionable. Maybe the new adventure fad will be exploring the post-apocalyptic ruins of Afghanistan or Iraq. Until then, however, these glorious but overpopulated routes are best forsaken for others less trodden.

So for four days we will see the less visited wonders of the southwest of Bolivia. We will witness lakes red and green and white, bathe in thermal springs, hike volcanoes and walk among giant boulders that mysteriously dot an arid, sandy plain. And then on Wednesday we will arrive in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, where we will drive or bus through the Atacama desert to Iquique, Chile´s sparkling coastal-desert city. So Allison will end her trip having traversed the South American continent latitudinally, swimming in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

What more poetic way to draw our adventure to a close, to bring things full circle?

A Game of Chess

If you´ve ever played chess, you know the feeling you get when you move a piece on the board and, the instant you take your hand off it, realize that you should have made a different move…

Sitting in the Internet cafe in Tupiza, Allison and I are straddling the horns of an international dilemma…whether to stay in Bolivia for her last week or whether to return to Argentina and/or hop a bus to the Atacama desert in northern Chile where I was going to spend the last week of my time alone. The dilemma is thus…

We sit at the edge of some of Bolivia´s most mind-blowing landscapes. All we have to do is hire a guide to drive us the 1,200 kilometers (on dirt roads) over four days to make the clockwise loop from Tupiza back up to the town of Uyuni, which is only about 200 kilometers from where we are now. Almost a full circle. Simple, right? Well, not so much. The drive is so long that even a four-day excursion only allows you some 15 minutes at each ¨site¨ to snap a couple of photos and then move on to the next. Those of you who know us well know that this is simply not our style. We could do five days, but it´s much more expensive (since it´s not the standard package) and it would put an end to our plans to see the Amazon in the north. We´re thinking about a private three-day tour that would afford us more time to hike in the far south end of the route near the famed Lago Verde but we couldn´t leave until Sunday, which means staying another night in Tupiza, a town we´ve grown to loathe after only 12 short hours. 

And another wrinkle…an important election on Sunday could mean that main roads into and out of cities, towns and even rural areas could be closed intermittently, further complicating road travel. Any route we might fly to get to La Paz would be horribly barroque (flying all the way to Buenos Aires just to come back to La Paz, Bolivia!). Shit. I´ll say it again. Shit. Shit. Shit. Knowing that the road closures could likely affect the time I was planning to spend in Bolivia after Allison´s departure, we´re thinking that maybe we should cut our losses and follow a path of less resistance.

Anyway, we felt a need to share some of the bad along with the good. At least we´re together in our crappy little $6 room and, no matter how dire the situation feels, we keep reminding ourselves that we´re not in the Grande Hotel.

The God-forsaken, Claustrophobic Terrain Around Tupiza

Desperate for Exercise, Perched over Tupiza

Soaking Up the Heat, Killing Time in Tupiza

A Gift from the Photo Gods

We´re back online with, you guessed it, multimedia. Allison had a brilliant idea to pay a photo lab to load photos from our camera to our jump drive that we could then plug into one of the crappy computers in the ¨locutorios¨ (or phone/Internet cafes) that populate practically every street corner in this country. We only manged to update two posts below with images, and WordPress´ photo uploader/editor leaves something to be desired, but hey…now you´ve got pitchers to gawk at.

Enjoy! Now we´ve gotta run to catch our bus to Bolivia!

Powercordless, Dusty, We Press On to Bolivia

We just arrived back in Salta, beating the ample dust from our clothes and eyeing the Bolivian border, which we will cross tomorrow by foot at the ripe hour of 8:00 a.m. That´s right, gentle readers, time to strap in for another overnight busride north!

If you´re scratching your heads wondering where we´ve been since leaving Cachi two days ago, well, not to put too fine a point on it, we´ve basically been hiding out in a desert paradise. The hotel we found outside Cafayete called La Casa de la Bodega is a small hotel-boutique winery with eight rooms and the capacity to produce just 6,000 liters of wine per year (and actually producing only about 4,000). It is set in a stunning red rock desert valley with towering mountains to the east and northwest and is surrounded by fertile agricultural land, including an organic goat farm (that happens to sell scrumptious goat cheese as well as fresh young goats — for braising — to the hotel´s restaurant). The accommodations were the most deluxe we´ve enjoyed to date, all for a whopping $120 per night. So yes, a splurge, but after more than five weeks on the road haven´t we earned it?

Our day yesterday consisted of an impromptu four-hour hike through the desert landscape surrounding the hotel, half a dozen games of chess in the hotel garden, a couple bottles of wine produced right there at the winery and that´s about it. We entertained the idea of staying on again tonight but we were getting antsy to reach Bolivia, seeing as Allison only has about ten days left before she´s back on a plane to San Francisco. Hard to believe we´re in the final leg of our joint journey. After she leaves, my plan is to travel more extensively through Bolivia and then head either to Peru or the Atacama desert in Chile.

Ready for the bad news? We´re still without a power cord for the laptop and will be for the rest of the trip. Which means no more pictures or videos until Allison is back home. (Sorry!) After two dozen phone calls to customs, FedEx and other courier services, we discovered that the power cord that Dennis sent to us from the U.S. got held up because customs 1) won´t allow packages to be delivered from the U.S. to a guest at a hotel and 2) won´t allow packages containing used computers or computer parts to be delivered without a physical signature from the recipient. If we had more time, we could have the package transferred from Buenos Aires to Salta, but it would take a few days and that´s valuable time we could be using to explore the Bolivian altoplano and the Amazon jungle! We seriously considered making the sacrifice so that you, our faithful readers, could share in the phototographic documentation of our adventure since Mendoza but the price to pay for multimedia is simply too high. We recognize that without photos we may lose some readers (I can think of one in particular), but for the next couple weeks you´ll just have to rely on the written word for your nightly entertainment.

Other than that we´re doing swell and will write more from across the border…

ON TO BOLIVIA!

The Delightful La Casa de la Bodega

A Lazy Afternoon of Chess and Wine

The Dog Whisperer Returns

Hiking in the Stunning Desert Lanscape Around La Casa de la Bodega

Precariously Perched

A Sits for Her Portrait

Scale Mountain…Check!

The Sun Sets on the Desert (And on Hair-dos)

Braving Another Garganta del Diablo (This One Dry)

a+b ramblings featured on the vines of mendoza blog

I was just checking our blog stats and noticed that some new visitors had been referred from the blog of the Vines of Mendoza, the swell wine bar/shop where Allison and I had our amazing tasting in Mendoza city. So I clicked the link and saw that we are indeed featured on their blog.

Visit vinesofmendoza.com/blog and scroll down to the second entry!

How Many Miles Driven on a Dirt Road Would Get You to the Middle of Nowhere?

Faithful Readers,

Thank you for bearing with us. It´s been several days since we last posted from the mountain town of Upsallata, the gateway to Andean skiing, the home of the now-rundown Gran Hotel where Perron and his cronies used to gather to ski and flaunt their ill-gotten gains, where for 12 straight hours I slept off a painful sinus cold, where I pilfered a bottle of extra virgin olive oil from the hotel restaurant, and where we embarked on a 1,500-mile journey that yesterday delivered us safely into the bosom of Salta. Ah, beautiful, lively, friendly, delicious Salta.

I must admit that when we arrived here yesterday, I had a 10-minute meltdown during which I railed at not having clean pants, lamented the ubiquitous lack of road signage on Argentine highways, and basically cursed all Argentine cities to the bowels of hell. It was my first meltdown in almost 5 weeks, so I figured I was entitled. What sequence of events left me teetering on the brink of insanity, you ask? Let´s start at the beginning…

I awoke in a fog on Wednesday morning having fallen asleep at 8:30 the night before with a pounding headache and the kind of sinus pressure that would make a shy, bald buddhist monk reflect on his life and plan a mass murder. The day began slowly, but the worst of the cold seemed to´ve passed and after considering just throwing in the towel and heading back to Mendoza for a couple of days, Allison and I got increasingly excited to hit the road toward our next destination, the small, isolated mountain town of Barreal.

The trip began like any other: towering, snow-capped Andean peaks above us, a sky so blue it was almost black, the road slicing like a knife through the high-desert landscape of scrub and dirt. Then things got interesting. Our beautiful paved road abruptly turned to dirt and rocks. After a minute or two on that road, we were sure it would turn back to pavement. After 10 minutes, we thought, maybe not. After 30 minutes, we thought, ¨Yup, we´re screwed.¨ Spine-jarring terrain aside, it was an amazing experience to drive three hours on that dirt road into the middle of nowhere, past stunning mountain scenery, desert landscapes, ancient dry lakebeds and a host of other natural wonders I won´t even list here. Our only concern, of course, was for the state of our automobile…a small Chevy hatchback that we´d christened ¨The Gnat.¨ Our concern only grew when halfway through our journey we passed a family that had piled out of their minivan while good ol´dad was down on his hands and knees changing a flat (read disintegrated) tire.

Frances of Rome, the patron saint of automobile travel, was with us that day though as we pulled into Barreal without event. And our luck kept getting better. The posada at which Allison had made a reservation was good beyond our wildest dreams. On about 20 acres of land, it had the feel of a horse ranch in some desert oasis in New Mexico. Our room was huge, with an adobe fireplace that already had a fire burning in it when we entered. With grins plastered on both our faces, we headed out for a long walk down to the Rio de la Plata that cuts through the desert and gives life to the town and the thousands of slender poplar trees that engulf it.

The night passed with a fine dinner at the posada, lots of red wine and an hour of stargazing through crystal clear, pitch-black skies before we crashed out in our comfortable bed with full bellies, dizzy heads and a fire roaring in the fireplace. Morning, a small setback: we awoke to find that The Gnat hadn´t fared as well as we´d thought. The rear left tire was flat as a pancake. No problem, we swapped out the bad tire for the good spare, bid Barreal farewell and headed out for the city of San Juan where we´d return the car that night and hop an overnight bus to Salta, some 1,500 kilometers north.

The drive that day to San Juan was even more stunning than the drive to Barreal and, luckily for The Gnat, was mostly paved. About an hour into the drive we were smack dab in the middle of more jaw-dropping, eye-popping high-desert terrain, the hills and mountain folded, crunched, bruised by the formation of the Andes to the west and then eroded by infrequent but torrential downpours, revealing an incredible array of colors and patterns in the underlying strata. Passing through this fantastical landscape, we saw the mouth of a dry riverbed gaping from between two gigantic rock formations so we pulled over, hiked up to the riverbed and followed its twisting, winding path into the mountains for almost an hour. Anything I could write about that experience would seem merely hyperbolic, so I won´t even try.

After the hike we pressed on through more and more and more breathtaking terrain, following the course of the Rio da la Plata out of the valley and into the lowlands. The time in San Juan was unremarkable but fine, and we caught our overnight bus to Salta without a problem. The 14-hour busride was long, as you can imagine, but we slept most of the night (the long-distance buses here are DE-LUXE, complete with seats that recline into beds) and arrived in Salta a little after noon.

So…the straw that broke the camel´s back and caused my meltdown…

When we arrived in Salta, we realized that we´d lost the power cord for my laptop and both batteries I brought with me were completely drained. A small setback, I know, but after being on a bus for fourteen hours and having a few days that had been up and down and the sinus cold and everything, it basically just pissed me off to the point that I had to scream about SOMETHING. Luckily, Dennis is FedExing us an extra power cord that´ll arrive early next week and we´ll be back on the air with pictures and other multimedia to entertain our readers, including a short film entitled ¨Desert Bootie Dance¨and some sweeping panoramas of the desert landscape we´ve come to love as our own.

For now, I´m signing off…

The High Desert Pre-Andean Landscape Around Barreal

The Gnat (Pre-Flat)

The Long (Tire-Killing) Road to Barreal

Running on A Dry Lakebed

On Rio de la Plata in Barreal

Chillin´ at Posada San Eduardo

Hiking the Dry Riverbed

In the Shit

“The Guesthouse of Ham,” or, “How the Author Came to Appreciate the Art of Naming Hotels after Cuts of Meat” (Dedicated to Mom and Harry)

What a strange experience — after the noise, grime and decaying opulence of Buenos Aires, the terrible beauty of the Iguazu falls, the sleepy grace of Mendoza city, and the eternal boredom of airports and bus stations and days spent waiting for the next move — to be tucked away in the Posada del Jamon (literally translated as the “Guesthouse of Ham”) near the town of Tunuyan in the Valle de Uco, one of Mendoza’s southernmost wine producing regions.

With our locomotion no longer dependent on mass transit (I mean, now that we have a car), it feels like a ridiculous luxury not to have our fate tied to a bus schedule. So here we sit, homemade lasagna and ravioli in our bellies, White Men Can’t Jump on the t.v. and a profound appreciation for once again being in the middle of bloody nowhere (and this time not having had to sweat through 3 shirts and endure the Grande Hotel to get there).

Just when we thought Argentina was a one-trick pony (or more accurately, a one-trick cow) in terms of its cuisine, Mendoza has surprised us at every turn…confirming our theory that food culture and wine culture always go hand-in-hand. Look, we’ve had some amazing food experiences thus far, with the lobsters at Ada’s and the steak at La Cabrera probably taking the cake. But the food in Mendoza is the most refined and delicious of any we’ve had. Roasted potatoes, truffles, poached eggs, wine-braised goat shank, smoked javali (wild boar), cheese and nuts and apples. It’s like being in Sicily again but without the Mafia.

And let’s not forget about the wines. Last night Allison and I ambled over to The Vines of Mendoza, a delightful wine bar in Mendoza city that puts together some brilliant flights of wine. So for over two hours we enjoyed a one-on-one tasting/lesson in the private tasting room with a woman named Fernanda. 6 glasses of wine later (each), we stumbled back to our guesthouse and crashed out, me trying to fend off a sinus cold (that finally caught up with me today) and Allison laughing hard at her own jokes.

On weekends, most wineries are closed (go figure), but today Allison managed to snag us reservations at Salentein and O. Fournier wineries, both in the Valle de Uco. These are bigger wineries that are winning all sorts of international awards and big points from magazines like Wine Snob, Vine Efete, Pompous Dick, etc. Anyway, the experience at Salentein was pretty amazing. We got a personal tour of the wine-making facility and barrel room and then tasted their reserve sauvignon blanc, pinot noir and merlot. Our guide Fernando (no relation to the aforementioned Fernanda) took very good care of us and even showed us the private tasting room where Robert Parker’s minions come every so often to make everyone at the winery sweat bullets. While O. Fournier winery was stunning in its architecture, we got lost three times trying to find it and when we finally arrived after 5:00 they rushed us through the tour and handed us a glass of their cheapest torrontes at the end and awkwardly hovered over us and watched us drink it before ushering us out the door.

We finally landed at the Posada del Jamon (I get a kick every time I say it) this evening and after some confusion about our reservation the owners fixed up a room, let us pick a bottle of wine from their cellar, brought us homemade lasagna and ravioli from their kitchen and bid us good night. As I nurse my cold and Allison watches the tube, we’re both feeling pretty swell about the next leg of our adventure…which of course will include ridiculous quantities of the finest wines available to humanity but also some light trekking in the Andes (which loom over the land here like nothing you’ve ever seen) and visits to some small mountain villages.

Wine Tasting in Mendoza City

The Stunning Salentein Winery

What Good Is Wine Without Food? (Clockwise from Top Left): Goat Shank Braised in Malbec with Roasted Potatoes at Salentein Winery; Smoked Salmon at Salentein Winery; Cheese and Meat Platter at the Vines of Mendoza; Housemade Ravioli and Lasagne Served in Our Room at the Posada del Jamon

The Architectural Marvel of O. Fournier Winery

Chillin’ on the Deck at O. Fournier Winery

Still Chillin’ on the Deck at O. Fournier Winery

Traditional Dancing Festival in Mendoza city

In the Barrell Room at Salentein Winery

Tasting at Salentein Winery

Interlude 2: You Asked for Food And Food Is What You’ll Get

We’ve gotten so many requests for more food posts and pictures that we thought we’d post a special installment on food and nightlife.

A+B Get A Little Loopy at Bar 878 in Buenos Aires

More Delicious Food (clockwise from Top Left): Grilled Bife de Lomo (Filet Mignon) and Fries at Aqua in Puerto Iguazu; French Fries Topped with Fried Eggs at Bar Uriarte in a Buenos Aires; Grilled Surubi (Iguazu River Fish) and Fries in Puerto Iguazu; Wok Cooked Veggies (To Stave Off Fry-Induced Thrombosis)

More Delicious Food (clockwise from Top Left): Salad of Wild Mushrooms, Truffles, Wilted Spinach and Poached Egg at The Winery in Mendoza; Grilled Bread with Jamon Crudo and Grilled Asparagus at The Winery; Smoked Javali (Wild Boar) at Azafran in Mendoza; Bife de Chorizo at Patio de Jesus Maria in Mendoza

Chillin’ in Bar Uriarte in Buenos Aires

A+B in Desperate Pursuit of An Almost Non-Existent Good Time in Puerto Iguazu

Interlude 1: The Dark Side of Intercontinental Travel

Lest our glowing blog posts lead you to believe that our trip has been nothing but charmed, let us share with you a few glimpses of the everyday dark side of travelling in South America:

Bad Land Development

Bad South American Cocktails

Meals on the Run

Maximum Velocity Cab Rides

Baffling Public Monuments

Waiting Out A Stomach Bug in Your Hotel Room

Lights, Camera, Action!

Okay…we’re trying out a new blog experiment…home video!

Click the screenshot below to download a 45 second video of the roaring Iguazu falls. (It may take a moment to load…so cool yer jets.)