Puente del Inca

About 3 hours west of Mendoza, by the Chilean border, lays a magnificent valley of red mountains and a river of chocolate!

The Andes as you dream them..

imagine a world where chocolate would be found on the ground!

And here it is.. Puente del Inca; a fantastic natural stone bridge covered in gold by the sulfur..

Girls and steaks!

As you collect information from travellers before arriving here, they are unanymous: Argentina is a wonderful country; you have to go there now!

And as you dig further to know why it's such an amazing place, they still agree on the two main elements: girls and steaks!..

Enormous girls and beautiful steaks!.. or maybe the other way round..

Well, travelling north from the far bottom of the country i couldn't quite grasp where this image was coming from, but now that i arrived in Mendoza it all makes a lot more sense!

20 pesos for an all you can eat delicious barbecue with free wine! This place is evil!!

And surely the girls around are no joke!

So to illustrate all this i thought of showing you this beautiful bench from plaza España!

Or how about this market roof?

And because i know you like that as much as i do, here's some more wall paintings from the streets of Mendoza..

But you got my point.. as for the true heart of the city, you'll have to come and experience it for yourself!

On the way to Mendoza..

I was just done bitching about Patagonia when the bus started heading north towards Mendoza.. and all of a sudden there they were! The Andes of my dreams! Blue lakes surrounded by hectic red rock peaks.. beautiful!.. Had i only know i was just there.. barely a couple of hours north of Bariloche..


I only got a couple of shots from the bus window, but you should have been there to see this!

Soon after, we reached the famous Pampa.. they were not lying; as hard as you look there ain't much to see there!

check this out.. a sunset on the Pampa.. ha ha!

25 years..

.. is the time it takes for music to reach the southern hemisphere!

All the way from Australia to New Zealand to Chile to Argentina, 80´s pop is all over the place.. I'm down on my knees to beg the music corporations to please send them some new records!.. While maybe scientists could work something out to increase the speed of sound accross the equator line!

Greetings from switzerland!

10 days in Argentina already.. from Rio Turbio to 28 de Noviembre to El Calafate to Rio Gallegos to Comodoro Rivadavia to Sarmiento to El Bolson to Lago Puelo to Bariloche..

but i can't quite figure it out yet : what is not ugly is way too touristic.. aside from 28 and Sarmiento that were small and cool.. El Calafate manages to be both ugly and extremely touristic!

and the patagonian Andes just look too much like switzerland.. beautiful snow mountains, lakes, forests and cute wooden chalets with VISA/AMEX logos all over them.. but somehow it doesn't fit my image of Argentina.. least of the Andes..

So i'm making my way up north; the salt deserts should be more exciting.. but Argentina is one large country so the north is still quite a few hours of bus ahead of me!

Anyway, here are a few pics from switzerland in the meantime..

as much as it costs me to get up, i just can't get tired of this morning light.. sunrise on Bariloche

On the way from coast to mountain at least you get to see some nice emptyness.. but no way to find a place to stay around there!


a nice ray of light on the cliff in El Bolson..

Lago Puelo's beach

..and off i go for another 19 hours of bus to Mendoza!... see you there!

Torres del Paine

Off i went for a new hike.. 5 days in Torres del Paine..

On top of being mad expensive the refugios had to be booked in advance.. and i just hate booking things in advance!.. so it would be camping.. at least i can take off whenever i want and change my mind at any point.. that's more like me!

Camping is actually pretty easy in this park, especially if you do the most common "W" circuit, as you can just camp on the lower points of the W and do the branches as day hikes, so you don't have to carry your tent most of the time..

Altogether it felt quite easier than the Kepler.. and i was much better prepared too, with a proper ration of pasta for every night!

Anyway.. i won't make you dream with beautiful lights (as some people had sold it to me!) but here's what it looked like..

An old jetty in Puerto Natales, before leaving..

the entrance of the park..
the first hike was the steepest and not the most interesting, but eventually the view on the famous "torres" was nice.. so there i am, posing for the tourist shot..
the second day was much better (eventhough i had to carry my tent this time!) with beautiful walks along the lakes..




third day.. i've left my tent down by the lake and climb up the "valle frances"..



the 360 degrees panorama of sharp peaks at the top of valle frances is hard to render in photo (especially with this weather) but very impressive!


fourth day, i walk up to glacier Grey..

and get to see icebergs! man, i love them! what's more beautiful (and more cold) than icebergs? Women maybe! and yet never so consistently! ;-)

for the return i had an option of taking a boat accross the lake back to the entrance, but my legendary cheapness took over me again and i prefered a nice 5 hours walk in the rain instead!

a model of the park, with the lakes, the glacier on the top left corner, valle frances in the middle, and the torres.. well you still have to know where!
of course only when we were driving out of the park did it start to clear up!

And that'll be it for a quick visit through Chile.. I'm off to Argentina next!..

The last country already.. can you believe this??