Vacations: Our days in Junín de los Andes

The trip from Neuquén to Junín de los Andes (which you saw in pictures in my last post) took about 6 hours. First we went west, into the arid central plain of the province, where pumpjacks stand solitary here and there, bobbing in slow motion. Then southwest, towards the Andes and the Lake District.

We arrived around 2 PM into a little bus terminal with a little wooden information booth beside the platforms. There we asked about La Casa de Aldo y Marita ("Aldo & Marita's House"), our chosen place of stay, and were promptly directed there. There was no need of a taxi, because Marita's is only 6 blocks away, one block from the river.

Junín de los Andes lies mostly between National Route 40 and the Chimehuin River, which forms its eastern border. To the west is the Lanín National Park; northwest you have Lake Huechulafquen and, north of it, the volcano that gives the park its name, Lanín, and the Mamuil Malal Pass to Chile.

The city itself is small, a town of about 10,000 residents with a few blocks of well-kept urban features and some commercial activity around a nice main square, plus quiet neighbourhoods of single-story houses and streets that gradually turn to gravel and dirt roads.

Our lodging was a residencial, that is, a kind of hostel that is fashioned out of someone's home. Residenciales tend to be more informal, cheaper, and obviously look more like houses than like hotels.

Aldo and Marita both run the place, but Marita is clearly the one in charge of the house and its temporary residents, while Aldo organizes fly fishing trips on the river and other aquatic entertainments for tourists, not necessarily the ones in the house. Marita also makes smoked trout and venison, which sell for steep prices in small amounts.

The place, as you'll see from the pictures, can only be described as "cozy" and "warm". You have all the things you can expect from a hostel (kitchen, sink, fridge, some supplies for common use, a common table), and one I hadn't seen before: an asador with parrilla, that is, a special brick oven and a grill to prepare and cook asado, inside the main room. On the other hand, Marita doesn't give you breakfast, but that's not that big a problem. The trouble with Marita's House is the wooden stairs and the upper floor in general. The whole house seems to bend and bow and it creaks loudly as you go upstairs to sleep, and once you're in your bed you can clearly hear everything in the common room. So you'd better be really tired when you go to sleep, or you won't be able to.

We stayed five nights, almost six days in Junín de los Andes, so this is only one of several posts, but I'll tell you from the start that I knew the best part of the trip was about to start as soon as I came into Marita's. People will tell you that Junín simply has too little of everything, but if you go there to rest, you'll find one of the most suitable spots for it; and if you're looking for simple adventure, you'll find it as well.

In practical terms, this whole area and especially Junín de los Andes is suited for budget travelers and backpackers and all others who, like me, don't care for pre-packaged tours. You can find accomodation in dozens of places. Buses come and go, taking you to places where you can experience the majesty of nature firsthand, and back to "civilization", cheaply, safely and quickly. Fellow travelers will engage you in conversation and give you all the best tips and hints. You can choose to walk around, wet your feet in the crystal-clear lakes and quick rivers, climb the hills, or just lie down in the grass. Nature's realm has only recently been invaded by humanity here. True, there are signs and roads, and trash where there shouldn't be, and every now and then a car will come by along the silent road, but that's about it.

Most important for us big-city urban dwellers, who have been increasingly forced to paranoia and mistrust of our fellow citizens, is that this place is one where you can stop looking over your shoulder all the time. You can be sent into a tourist trap by an agency, and you can be scammed, but you can also stay away from that and explore by yourself.

On our first day in Junín de los Andes we just tried to get our bearings — finding out where the center, main square, cybercafés, supermarkets, etc. were. As the sun came down a bit, we hit the square and just lied there with our mate (and my camera). The next day promised to be exciting, our first trip into the real Lake District.

Why, why?

So why did I go? Why, indeed, does one go on vacation to places outside the main touristic routes, especially when one hasn't exhausted, or even scraped past the surface of, the treasure of worthy touristic riches of a country like Argentina?

I went to Posadas due to a simple economic fact: I can't afford hotels. I mean, I could afford a passable hotel, and even a good hotel for a few days, but it would cost me money I'd rather spend on something else, like staying more days or suddenly deciding to take a bus and leave for another place. Priorities, priorities! Posadas had a hostel, or at least something that my Hostelling International map/chart of Argentina showed as a hostel, though it was more like a storehouse for cheap tourists (you check in and get assigned a place to put your stuff and, at night, your body). Anyway, it was a fine place except for the shower, which was never hot enough, and then they have a good excuse for that, with Posadas being in a subtropical climate zone and all.

I went to Encarnación because it was close to Posadas and I wanted to see another country. It didn't disappoint me. It was quick and cheap to come and go, and there were nice surprises, and the customs bureaucracy was not that bad.

Now why, why Oberá? Why going 100 km almost literally into the forest and land on a pension where the bed was older than me and you had to yank a chain after you went to the bathroom? Maybe because of that, precisely: because I've had enough of the big city and the complicated stuff and things that look just as home. Maybe because I got a recommendation from a friend, and I had a good feeling about it (the place indeed had good vibes). Or just because. You'd have to visit Oberá, if you can, and walk your shoes off along those hill chains they call avenues, and talk to the people, to understand why such an impulse trip paid off so much. I don't have the ability to convey why Oberá was so beautiful to me, why on my first day there I sent an SMS to my friend in Rosario to thank him for telling me to go to Oberá, and why I haven't stopped singing its praises in front of everyone I know and boring them all with pictures and stories about Oberá.

When the lady in the clothing shop asked me why, she was at first under the impression I was some kind of man-with-a-mission specimen. "Are you here for the shorts?", she inquired (meaning not clothes, but the international festival of short independent films being held in Oberá, by coincidence, at the time). "No", I said, "I'm here just to look around." "You told me you were a journalist, right?" I laughed. "Nothing of the sort. I'm a photographer... well, I just walk over here and there and take pictures." I hope she wasn't disappointed. I'm inclined to believe she wasn't. Only two days later, when I told her I was leaving in the afternoon, she said: "Oooh, but you can't leave! What a pity, now that we've started to care for you!"

San Rafael

San Rafael is a city of 170,000 in the center-south of Mendoza Province. It's modern, and it has nearly no old architecture or historical buildings. I wouldn't call it a tourist trap, but in truth the town itself is not worth many visits. You can find wide avenues, supermarkets, icecream parlours, gift shops, a few parks, and tourist agencies. The real San Rafael is outside the city: the Atuel River, the lakes, the mountains.


Tierrasoles Hostel is not your place if you don't care for young, active people. It looks and feels like a huge student residence: lots of beer and Fernet con Coca flowing in the tables, noisy groups of hormone-crazed 20-somethings, communal showers, packed rooms, people who stay up late at night and like to go partying, and an assortment of spoiled brats (usually porteños) with lots of time and daddy's money to spend. The communal showers were OK; the rooms were acceptable, if cramped; the breakfast medialunas were awful. The service is good, but quite logically it's not very personal.

The night after we arrived, the reception guy, Cristóbal, approached us expansively, telling us about a disco called La Barra, set up along a dam about an hour from the city. Let's party, whoo!!, drink Fernet in the van with the rest of the passengers, talk up the hostel's girls, he proposed. So we went. Bad mistake. La Barra is your classical all-purpose disco, which doesn't cater for anyone in particular, and so needs to pack each and every musical trash currently en vogue in a potpourri. The music was as varied as it was awful (with the exception of 45 minutes of classical rock nacional which me and one of my friends enjoyed wholeheartedly, knowning the rest would be worse). The local girls were too young and were mostly taken; the local boys were also young, ostentatiously gym-goers, and drunk. The place was uncomfortably packed and the drinks were not as cheap as they should have. (Do I sound like a bitter old man already? I'm 30 and I'm always fine in the company of 20-somethings. But I don't like my fun being mis-planned by someone else.) Worst of all, we couldn't leave; we were in the middle of nowhere and the van would not depart until 5:30 AM.


Fortunately La Barra was not our best experience in San Rafael and was soon forgotten and turned into one of those funny bad times (the way you remember when you broke your arm when you were 12). We had come for landscapes and water, and we got plenty. We did rafting in the Atuel River, which is level II only, and I bathed in Los Reyunos, formerly a private country club, now a private camping site with pools and beaches.


Being in Mendoza we couldn't skip the wineries, so we visited two: Bianchi and La Abeja. Bianchi, founded by the obviously megalomaniacal Enzo Bianchi, has a huge estate just outside San Rafael, with buildings which look like Venetian houses (according to our guide), a fountain, and statues. They use top technology and produce quality old wines, champagne and sparkling wines. We spotted a typical unsophisticated Argentine tourist buy two bottles of rosé New Age, an overpriced bubbly soft wine that is marketed to young adults and which you can buy in any supermarket in town... You can't beat us at sarcasm. The poor guy was about 50, he had a prominent beer belly and wore a sleeveless T-shirt; he had no idea what he was doing, and we really skinned him alive.

La Abeja was founded by San Rafael's founder, Rodolfo Iselín, a French immigrant who came to make wine and found that there were no workers and no railway to carry away his produce; so he got Italian and French families to live in his land, basically as serfs, and President Julio A. Roca to fund a railway to reach Rosario and Mendoza, so that the wine wouldn't have to endure months of travel in slow carriages. The winery is owned by a different family now, and it produces a small amount of wine of several varieties. I tried and bought a young Tempranillo-Bonarda blend and a Chenin Blanc. This visit was much more interesting than Bianchi — the old traditional flavour was better, the guide did not act like a robot, and we got a history lesson for free and a personal conversation with the wine expert.

We stayed in San Rafael four days; next we went to Malargüe... the best part of the journey. I'll tell you about that tomorrow.