Vacations: Into Neuquén

Although in my last post I said "this was our last day in Malargüe", I should've said "our last whole day". We had to go from there to Neuquén, but what should be the most direct path was unavailable — National Route 40, which goes south across the desert, has been in the same sorry state since ever, and you can't use unless you have a special vehicle. So instead of going straight south into Neuquén Province and reach Chos Malal, you have to go north-northeast to San Rafael, and then east and back south along the border of Río Negro, get to Cipolletti, cross the river and then you're in Neuquén City. That's an almost semi-circular route that takes about eight hours for a trip that should take at most five.

So, in order to avoid paying for an extra night and/or arriving at ridiculous times, we stayed in Malargüe half of the next day, then took the 3-hour bus ride to San Rafael, rested a bit there (outside that creepy bus station!), had dinner, and then at about 11 PM boarded the bus to Neuquén. The trip was unenventful. I slept through the night, and woke up at dawn as we arrived in Cinco Saltos, less than an hour before our destination.

Neuquén's bus terminal station is almost brand-new, and it looks more like an airport, with lettered embark gates and all. Everything seems to be neatly organized, if only a little sterile.

Neuquén itself seems to be a fairly modern city. The downtown area (where I stayed at all times) is within the limits marked by National Route 22 and the river. There are a couple of wide avenues and a lot of trees lining the streets, but no large parks (that I know of). Constant irrigation of grass in public spaces through sprinklers is conspicuous; this is still, after all, semi-arid Patagonia, and only the fact that it's at the junction of two large rivers spares it from being a bone-dry plain.

Visitors looking for historical buildings and sites will also be rather disappointed; even to the untrained eye Neuquén shows a complete lack of old architectural styles. The city looks neat, like its bus station, and much unlike Rosario or Buenos Aires with their layers and layers of new and old dirt and cracks, with their half-visible cycles of destruction and reconstruction.

Neuquén was a small frontier town when the big cities of central Argentina were already metropolises. It was at the border of civilization, the equivalent of the American Far West, at the beginning of the 20th century, a couple of decades after the "Conquest of the Desert" (i.e. the government-sponsored genocide of the Patagonian natives and the subsequent occupation of their lands, in several waves), and continued to be a small city until oil was discovered in the area in the 1960s.

Well, we found our little hotel quite easily and checked in. It wasn't a pleasant experience. The owner of the hotel was a Polish immigrant who must have seen World War I with her own eyes, a bit hard of hearing to say the least, extremely methodical, rather reserved, and mindful of waste to the point of pasting newspaper articles and warning signs about water and energy conservation. She charged quite a lot for a rather basic service, though in her defence I must say all of Neuquén City is terribly expensive. No kitchen, no space for laundry, no breakfast, and no showers unless you paid an extra fee, and this was more expensive than the (infinitely better) hostel I found in San Martín de los Andes.

Neuquén City seems not to have understood its own touristic potential for budget travelers looking for a conveniently urban base for exploration. If it weren't for the outrageous prices, I would've stayed 4 or 5 days, and explored the whole Alto Valle area of Río Negro and the interior of Neuquén (such as the oil towns of Plaza Huincul/Cutral-Có and Zapala). As it was, we decided to cut it to only 2 nights.

On the first day we decided to do some reconnaisance. We walked around town, I took pictures, we got some information from the tourism office, and we came to the conclusion that trying to move around without a car and without paying ridiculous sums of money to an agency was pointless. This was just not a touristic part of the province, period.

So in the afternoon we followed the tourism office's advice and visited the beach. Neuquén has three public beach resorts, all easily accessible on foot, about 2 km from Route 22. We chose one and settled on the sand. The day was rather hot, so we bathed in the river, and then came back to dry in the sun. By pure luck we caught a kayak regatta in progress (nice colourful pictures for moi).

By this time, incidentally, we'd gotten accustomed to using sunblock all the time we were outdoors. I'd taken the precaution of getting some protective tan before leaving Rosario, but still the Patagonian sun was terrible, and soon we were all quite red, sunblock notwithstanding. I'm naturally dark, so I didn't get burned, but I came back almost chocolate-brown and peeling in a couple of spots.

Vacations: Getting there is half the fun

The title is ironic, of course. The weather was oppressive the day when we departed from Rosario. We took the Chevallier bus to San Rafael, Mendoza, at 8 PM (in full afternoon glory, thanks to our crazy DST scheme). There's no direct bus from Rosario to tiny Malargüe so we had to make a combination.

Off we went, west and south. Some time afterwards it began raining lightly, and then a T-storm broke out. Nothing serious. Around 1 AM, near Venado Tuerto (I'm guessing), the bus stopped. A tree or a branch or something had fallen over the road, so all traffic was stuck.

At first nobody told the passengers what had happened, so we speculated it was a car crash. Then we learned about the tree and started waiting for whoever was in charge of removing it.

We stayed there for over an hour, possibly an hour and a half. I slept in short stretches, while the rain continued. Finally we resumed the trip, but instead of arriving at 9:15 as scheduled, we got to San Rafael around 11 AM. We missed the bus we could've boarded at 10:15, and the rest were all full. The next available bus departed at 6 PM. We were faced with the choice of taking that bus (spending 7 hours in San Rafael) or looking for emergency cheap accomodation in San Rafael for the night.

Now San Rafael is a nice city, but not particularly attractive, and we were after all carrying our huge travel bags, so we couldn't possibly just take a walk around and do sightseeing. And San Rafael's bus terminus is truly creepy, a cramped half-block with dirty platforms and unpleasant-looking little shops, with some people looking as if they either want to rob you or sell you a fake Rolex, to the point it reminded me of Paraguay.

The alternative, however, wasn't really for us. We didn't want to spend a night in San Rafael, but anyway finding accomodation was hopeless, and it entailed losing the day completely, as well as a night's expenditure. So we dragged our bags from the terminus to a nearby public square, and I set off looking for two things: a phone to call the hostel's folks in Malargüe to ask them not to cancel our booking, and something to eat for lunch. I got an OK from Malargüe, and got us the ingredients for sandwiches. After those, we sat there sipping mate, getting suntanned, and generally looking like out-of-luck bums.

The bus finally came in time, and after almost three hours of travelling south with several stops seemingly in the middle of nowhere, we reached our destination at about 9 PM (under a Patagonian sun at full blast). I was back in Malargüe at last, after a year of waiting for the peace and quiet of that little corner of Argentina, and 25 hours in the road.

Hail in Mendoza

Latest news of Argentina include a weather gone absolutely crazy. In the northwest of Argentina (provinces of Salta and Tucumán) it's been raining an awful lot, and the Salado River downstream in Santiago del Estero broke a dam and overflowed its banks, prompting many to evacuate (the Salado is a very long river — it starts up there and ends 1,500 km later in the Paraná River, near Santa Fe City, which it flooded in 2003). Last Wednesday 170 mm of rain fell in Reconquista (northern Santa Fe), flooding several parts of the city, its surroundings and many neighbouring towns in a matter of hours.

Last Friday, the city of San Rafael in Mendoza (a hot, sunny paradise when I was there two weeks ago) was hit by a hailstorm. Anti-hail nets protecting the vine crops were useless against the reportedly fist-sized hailstones that fell for about 25 minutes, and many saw their crops partly or completely ruined less than a month before the National Festival of the Vendimia (grape harvest). This, plus the damages in the city, may add up to about 50–60 million pesos (US$17–20 million). (Incidentally, if you want to know more about Mendoza's hail and wine, try Argenvino. I just discovered it — I was linked from it without my knowledge!)

(The above is a vineyard besides the Valentín Bianchi winery, not far from San Rafael City, as it was before the storm... I presume it doesn't look like that now.)

Deadly hail seems to have become more common everywhere lately (as you'll remember if you were in Rosario during November's hail hell). San Rafael had been hit already on 31 December 2006 and I seem to remember the area of Mendoza City had had its share a few days before my trip in early January.

Nobody died in San Rafael then or now, fortunately, but the mendocinos are clearly concerned to the point of having developed their own anti-hail rockets. The scientists of the Civil Institute of Space Technology created this rocket to replace the Russian-made devices that were in use before the devaluation of the Argentine peso made them unaffordable — and which were not very useful anyway, since they were designed to target clouds at a height of 8 km, while the typical clouds in Cuyo are above 15 km.


PS: As of 2 Feb, the national government has pledged to help Mendoza with AR$25 million, to be used to repair infrastructure and rebuild homes. Besides the immediate damage, the storm destroyed the fertility of 4,000 hectares of soil, which will be unproductive for 3 years.

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.

12 days, 11 nights

I'm back! Wow! It seemed like ages and I didn't want to return, but here I am, back from Mendoza.

I won't attempt to condense the whole experience in one blog post, or any number for that matter; it's impossible. There were highlights and a few dark spots — I promise I'll try to mark the highlights and underscore the dark spots. The latter were few, among them (1) the late night amateur recital in the hostel's bar that kept me awake in my room in Mendoza City, (2) the formerly unheard-of humid heat in said city, and (3) the time and money wasted in that horrible outdoors disco outside San Rafael where our hyperactive host lured us (most probably for a commission). Not bad for a 12-day trip amidst a maze of tourist traps!

As for the highlights... Again walking the wide, tree-lined avenues of Mendoza City, hearing the murmur of the irrigation channels in the shade... Eating the best asado on Earth at Bar Loa, a.k.a. La Casa de Papito (on San Martín Ave. north of the city, just entering Las Heras)... The scorching sun in Potrerillos as you climb the tiniest hill, feeling you're a bit closer to climbing the mighty mountains. The initiate's thrill upon encountering the novice-level rafting course on the Atuel River... The peaceful lake of Valle Grande and the four hydroelectrical power plants on the Atuel Canyon... The cold emerald-colored waters and the wind under the sun on Los Reyunos... The lonely desert, only sand and spiny bushes and basalt rock running past as the Andes get closer and climb higher... An oasis of wood and canes and mud in the arid countryside of Malargüe, tended by no less than three beautiful young women (blonde, blue-eyed, two Swedish and one Austrian) and by a Dutch guy who would make the tiny hostel's cabin grow every day... Baby goat cooked in a mud oven and served with assorted roasted vegetables, with as much wine as you wanted... The walks after dinner under the clearest Milky Way, no moon, no street lights, only the faint snowy peaks in the West... The mystery inside the Witches' Cave, the suddenly deafening rush of your blood in your ears when you turn off your lights and stay silent... The pink flamingos gathering at sunset over Llancanelo Lagoon, along the horizon... The tastiest vegetable soup, the best homemade bread, the long conversations about nothing in the night, as the wind becomes strong and chilly...

Well, I set off on the exact kind of summary that I promised I wouldn't do! I'm still in disbelief, sitting before a computer after (seemingly) a very long time, my hair and beard a complete mess, and my luggage still half unpacked. What am I going to do on Monday, when I have to go to work?