EL CHALTEN (the land of OZ)

El Chalten (the trekking capital of Argentina and definitely Patagonia) is a seasonal town of 600 inhabitants year around if that.  The landscape is oz-like when the weather permits.  Most days the blanket of clouds clings to the shark fang-like jagged peaks of the Fitz Roy mountains, the fabric of cloud never fully tears free, but slowly releases precipitation continuously.  The giant southern Patagonia Ice field, is a giant glacier covering 220 miles and 650 square miles, rests behind Cerro Solo and the Fitz Roy Peaks.  When allowed the sun shines through melting the glacier evaporating small water molecules into the sky creating giant cumulous clouds that billow out behind the peaks then migate out, slithering from the canyons, slithering where the east wind scatters them into anihilation out over the high desert plateau of the Patagonia Steppes.

Most buildings in town are either hostels, hotels, cafes, restaurants, bars or expedition guiding companies.  Guides can be hired for treks to alpine glacier-fed lakes, across glaciers mountaineer style, to climb peaks of 10,000 ft or over 3,000 meters.  Also guides can be hired to scale the world famous climbing routes on phenomenal granite faces that are world renown.

I have met up with many travelers from around the world.  It is interesting how educated and interesting most travelers are; too bad this is a small percentage of the world`s population. Not only are they educated as far as degrees, but that most of them are very well read, eco-conscious, passionate about life and really care about the future and fate of our world and are not trying to escape to some place in the afterlife that is germ-free, tidy and secured by angels but care about this life, the only one we have and may ever have.

I met a guy named Ilan Fuss (translates as Tree Foot), from the last hostel in El Bolson.  He was born in Berkeley and has lived for the past seven years in Seattle working as a solar energy consultant.  His mother is Israeli and he has a dual citizenship in both countries.  He served two years in the Israeli Army.

I also met another guy named Ben ( Benodetto) his dad wanted to name him.  He has Italian heritage and is from Portland, Maine.   His father was a green beret in the Marines and his mom and dad fought a lot growing up, so at some point his mom took him and his three brothers and sought refuge in Maine in a trailer.  He now manages one the finest lobster restaurants and bars in Portland, serving local food with a deck overlooking the harbor with fishing boats arriving and has lots of local bands coming in to play there. I met Ben at a hostel in Esquel.

They are both here in El Chalten in different hostels.  Like I said there is a plethora of hostels here.  El Chalten becomes a booming metropolis during the peak season for trekking and climbing.  Ilan said at his hostel the other night there were four Scandinavian climber dudes that are sponsored by multiple climbing and clothing companies to climb all over the world.  They just put a new route up Cerro (Mt.) Eigger.  It took more than two days of multiple pitches.  They said they have been here for over three weeks and have only had a few fair-weather days.  They do not know how much longer they will be here, but this is indeed their favorite and main places they travel too to climb.

The hostel I now write from is called Rancho Grande and it is that, probably with a hundred people or more inhabiting different rooms.  It has a bar and a restaurant and this morning I had my first ¨Americana Breakfast¨, with bacon, eggs, toasted sliced biscuits, juice and coffee.  I was going through withdrawl from bacon and needed a good ol´fashion artery clogging.  I will be satisfied for several weeks.  It cost 35 Argentine pesos and that roughly comes out to seven American dollars.

The world is indeed a small place.  I had a feeling I would see someone I knew yesterday. I was shopping in the supermarket (supermercado) and bumped into a guy I have seen creeping around at different environmental and science talks.  The ¨Montana Connection¨ might be a small state but is filled with truly amazing people.  Him and his wife are from Canada but he does a great deal of biological studies in the Flathead valley surrounding Glacier National Park.  His name is Dave and we have similar friends in common.  He has worked with my good friend Darren Pfeifle´s wife Erin Sexton.  Erin is an aquatic biologist specializing in preserving one of the main arteries of Glacier National Park and the North Fork of the Flathead Valley studying the North Fork of the Flathead River and trying to help stop mininig from happening in the Canadian Flathead.

Intuition is a powerful sixth sense that cannot be denied.  Science may never be able to measure it, and perhaps that is where the beauty lies.  Science may be able to prod, probe, and in some cases invade every living tissue in the material world, but it will never fully understand or take away the mystery of life or steal it´s magic, at least I hope not.

After the new year Ben, Ilan and I are going to go for a five day backpacking trip into the surrounding terrain.  I have a feeling I could be holed up here for several weeks.  I must get pictures of this other-worldly place like something out of Tolkien´s imagination.

PATAGONIAN STEPPES

The sun shines through space-shipped shaped lenticular clouds upon an vast and immense, barren and desolate landscape consisting of dull-brown short grasses.  The seventeen hour bus ride from Esquel to El Chalten (the trekking capital of the Argentina) shoots down a flat valley with table-top mesas stacking upon each other upon the horizon.  Mirages appear affecting the waking mind fabricating it to feel as if one is hallucinating as the table-tops of the mesas slide by each other in the sweltering sun like tectonics plates in motion.  The road stretches for hours in a fine-sandy gravel then changes to asphault out in the middle of nowhere for hours then changes back to gravel and vice-versa.  This bus sucked donkey blank as there was no room, crowded with bus-seats crammed back to back with barely enough room to sit, no shocks, and no free meals, but still cost a great deal.  Unfortunately, it was the only option. 

Dust and sand tail behind the speeding bus as Nandus (or Rheas) scatter from the clouds of dust.  Nandus are a flightless bird that is similar but smaller than the African ostrich.  They roam the dry steppes of Eastern Patagonia which is where I am traveling through, in the Santa Cruz province.  They occassionally venture into the Andean foothills.  They run quickly avoiding its enemies by constantly changing direction as it flees like a rabbit or a hare.  Small and sparse pockets of scrub brush dot the yellowish-brown landscape in hunters green.  Three Nandus and a Mara or Patagonian Hare scatter from behind brush from the uncomming rumbling bus. 

Guanacos with their brownish-white bodies herd together in small groups either all males like a bachelor group or females with young like a nursury.  Alpacas or Llamas are the domesticated version of them.  One of their few enemies is the sleek-bodied and agile puma who prowls throughout Patagonia and infact lives from the tip of Tierra del Fuego all the way north to the Yukon.  Pumas have been relentlessly persecuted because of livestock owned by the ranchers.  White sun-bleached Guanaco skeletons lie strewn about the steppes, probably killed by pumas or automobiles then scavenged by Lord God Bird, the Andean Condor with its ten foot wingspan.

The darkness swallowed the light by midnight but as we drove south we chased the sun and I do not know if the colors of the sunset ever left the sky entirely like Alaska in the summertime.  I never think of the southern hemishpere as being so similar to the north but it becomes obvious and apparent when traveling here.

The southern cross is like the Big Dipper is to the north with a star pointing to the south pole like Polaris points to the north.  Orion`s belt is one of the few constellations I recognize outside of Cassiopeia.

For those of you who have not heard I lost my cell phone with all my contacts and my email of bepolley@care2.com has been affected by spam so I lost all my email addresses.  My new email is bepolley@gmail.com and please send me your email address.  Thanks for all the support and happy new years from the southern hemisphere.

Parque Nationale de Alerces

 (friend Elan from Seattle)

Today, I went to parque de Alerces just southwest in the province of Esquel in the Chubut Province.  This park is known for preserving some of the oldest trees in the world.  Alerces (lahuen to the Mapuche Indians) are similar and are related to the  Redwoods and the Sequoias of California. Alerces is the second largest lived tree in the world after teh California Bristlecone Pine.  Carbon-14 readings of an lerce stump of over 4 meters in diameter gave an age of 3621 years at the time the tree was felled.  The oldest tree in the park is over 2,400 years old.  There are also stands of bamboos (which I did not think were in Argentina), Madrone trees and Chilean Cypress (Cipres de la Cordillera).  Most of the trees are deciduous with small, round leaves.  Trees line the edges of the many lakes climbing way up high to tree-line before they hit glaciated rock.  Dark granitic horns peak out of the mountain tops like tufts of feather on Great Horned Owls.  Thick deep gray and blue glaciers are nestled high on the mountain peaks hundreds of feet deep in places.  Waterfalls cascade and stream down forming rivulets carving out drainages through the folding rippling muscles of the mountains leading down towards tuquoise and emerald blue gems; jade-colored lakes chained together by pristine rivers with giant trout fishing the edges and resting in its deep blue, cold waters.

It reminds me so much of Montana and specifically Glacier National Park except the fact that the predominant trees are decidous and not conifers like the Rocky Mountain West.  River Otters ( Huillin) hunt the waters along with King Fishers.  Pumas prowl the dark forest stalking huemuls, pudus (smallest deer in the world, 10 cm at the shoulder), and birds.  Giant yellowish, sandy-brown and gray Ibis (Buff-necket Ibis Bandurria) peck at worms and bugs with their long beaks foraging through grasses before they fly off to safety in the treetopos mocking us humans with their laughter as if we are unimportant, which we are, but it is hard to take it from a damn bird.

Monkey-like rodent marsupials Llaca often called monito for little monkey, having little hands and feet resembling monkeys, doze in dark holes under and inside of trees hiding and hunkering down from the tormenting mid-day sun.  Out of the cover of shade the temperatures rise in the mid-eighties.  Wild rose bushes prosper in bunches in the open spaces.

Cirrus clouds of horse-hair whisps the sky in brush strokes painting and fore-telling the change in atmospheric conditions as storm clouds build over the Andes threatening with rain, which could be a nice relief.  Droughts are already threateing one week after the genesis of summer as cherries and strawberries bloom early in little red clusters of sweet nectar.  Horseflies and other gnats pester any exposed skin leaving behind welts.

Birds songs circulate throughout the trees calling forth the verdant green and growth of summer like Pan´s flute (the god of fertility and growth).

Debris and driftwood line the shorelines of lakes and rivers admist the cobblestones revealing the high water marks of the early spring run-off.

Today I sit reminiscing along the glacier waters about Christmas dinner and the festivities.  Lamb barbecued and roasted on a metal cross over hot burning embers. Lambchops dripping mutton juice on top of coals, sizzling.  Sourcream mashed potatoes, salad, hors-doerves with plenty of wine and champagne to toast yet another year of living, followed by vanilla ice cream with freshly sliced Kiwis and Peaches with sprinkled chocolate flakes dazzled on top.

The feast fed thirteen of us and delivered leftovers the day after making lambwiches for several meals.  Cheers and Happy New Years; a toast to life and its plentiful banquet.  There is enough for all if noone gets greedy.

Volacano Puyehue is the volcano erupting white glassy ash into the air not Volcano Lanin.  It has killed off over half a million sheep in Patagonia and covered the sky in ash today blotting out a huge moutain with its glacier by mid afternoon. The volcano is northwest of here, hundreds of miles away and miles from Bariloche.

The cows in Argentina seem to be fat and happy cows who free range through lustrous grasses combing the Pampas Steppes (foothills of the Andes) for good grass.  I understand their desire.  They roam following their many stomachs over hillock and valley in pristine country with majestic mountains, streams and lakes to wallow in when the sun gets unbearable.  Cows have it pretty good here.

UNDER ARGENTINIAN SKIES

Yesterday, I climbed Cerro (Mount Piltriquitron), which is supposedly where one of the energy meridian lines transect the earth.  I hiked up the road 4.5 km before hitching up the other 6.5 km to the trailhead.  The trail climbs high up through flowers with brilliant crimson red flowers then continues up through forests consisting of trees that resemble Douglas Firs with the same bark, but has deciduous leaves instead of pine needles.  It continues several kilometers up to a refugio, where one can buy mate, cerveza, coffee, soda, pizza, sandwiches or empanadas.  The refugio serves as a resting place and you can also camp there.  It lies a little less than half way up to the summit and has a balcony surrounding it.  The trail continues up to the saddle between Piltriquitron and another unknown mountain and then climbs up through snowfields leading to the rocky-ice covered rimy summit.  There were several inches of snow on the top.  The summit is not super tall but is 2260 m or around 8,000 ft. It is much taller than many surrounding peaks except Tronador which is over 70 miles away.  Over looking the valley you can see into Chile and as far north as Mt. Tronodor above Bariloche which is one of the highest peaks in the area.  The surrounding valley below remindes me of the Bitterroot valley just south of Missoula with similar glacially shaped jagged peaks and where Piltriquitron lies is like the Sapphire range, but only much bigger.  I could see mountains in every direction as far as the eye could see.  Lots of snow still lingering in the high country.

(2011 Summer Solstice Stashe)

I thought I turned red under Montana skies, but here under Argentinian skies my skin is going to turn crimson.  Talking to many of the locals they say there is no ozone layer here or the hole is incredibly large.  The sun has definitely baked me the days it finds pockets to shine through or when there is not a cloud in the sky.

I met a Sweedish couple and a Danish couple at the top of the mountain who know little spanish and hitchhiked throughout Chile and are continuing up through Argentina.  I have also met three ecologists staying at my current hostel who are from the Netherlands on vacation.  Another guy from the Bay area originally who now lives in Seattle and his name is Elan.  Tonight in our hostel we will be celebrating Christmas and are slow cooking a whole lamb on the barbecue.  Tonight´s fiesta will definitely last into the morning hours.  They shut down the streets of the main town to celebrate life.  I hear after everyone gets nicely buzzed everybody takes bus rides out to Lago Puelo and jumps into the glacially cold waters to rejuvenate and sober up.

CHOCOLATE and CHEESE; Hops, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in EL Bolson

The last few days the Andean Spring brought fickle mountain weather to Bariloche and the surrounding area. Spitting rain followed by brief sunshine followed by more rain came in waves all day.  A saying in Montana goes, Ïf you don´t like the weather wait five minutes.¨ Change is the only constant variable in life and we have to roll with it.

Bariloche is a very touriste town reminding me of Big Fork, MT, but on steroids.  It has over 80,000 people,whereas Big Fork has several thousand.  It even has a lake the size of Flathead Lake called Lago Nahuel Huapi.  The Andes jut out from the west side of the lake.  The lake is a glacial remnant over 100km long and covers more than 500 sq km.  The west of town lies the Andean divide separating Chile from Argentina.  The tallest peak is Tronador at 3554 meters, which is an extinct volcano meaning the Thunderer as blocks of glacial ice rumble and tumble down from its lofty summit.  The city is also like a city in the French Alps with all the French villas and chateau-like building styles abound lining the lakes and towns edges.  Bariloche is the chocolate capital of Argentina and has the biggest ski resort in all of South America.  The snow is a soft, light, dry, fluffy powdery snow like the kind they get in Utah making for the best powder turns.  I stayed in the GreenHouse Hostel the last few nights.

Yesterday, the morning of the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere, I rode a bus on a long and winding road through a jungle-like temperate rainforest to the town of El Bolson (the hops capital of Argentina and provides 3/4 of the country´s hops).  El Bolson is just south of parque de Nauhuel Huapi and is as busy as Yosemite in California, which attracts so many visitors that the very values of its founder Moreno expressed are at risk.  It is being loved to death like many of the parks in our own country.

I rode the bus next to a man my age named Antonio and we tried and tried to communicate.  We kept passing dictionaries back and forth and finally breached an understanding of really not understanding at all.  Finally, he pulled out his IPOD and handed me one ear piece and he took the other and we settled for thumbs up and smiles as he played and shared his musical tastes with me.  Music truly does bring the world together.  El Bolson is a small town of 20,000 inhabitants, nestled in a very fertile valley surrounded by mountains.   The fertile valley produces tons of strawberries, raspberries, hops, apples and cherries.  It is a laid back little town synonymous with pony-tailed back to nature hippie folks who began to flock here in the 1970´s (a.k.a. hippie headquarters of Argentina).  It is the first town in South America to become a nuclear free zone or an ecological municipality. Tons of artisians and musicians.  I went to the local art fair which is an all day event that happens three days a week.  It is as if every hippie came out of the woodwork and everyone is an artist of the highest calliber like a little Renaissance.

Last night I went and heard live music about five blocks away from the current hostel I am at and it poured down rain and snowed high in the moutains.  Some of the music was great with tons of freaks, everywhere!  I felt quite at home. El Bolson is also the town where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid out and the movie was filmed.  He escaped here in the late 1800´s or early 1900´s when he was wanted in several western states for being a cattle and horse thief and a highway man.

El Bolson also lies along certain energy meridian lines that transect the earth at different locales that older civilizations definitely knew about where to build, grow and live.  Machu Pichu, Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and the Great Pyramids are just a few examples of places that lie along meridian lines.  I will admit I was sort of skeptical about this, but I have to question my being a skeptic because I notice walking around the streets with a perma smile alot and kind of feel groovy all the time without being high on anything and the early feeling of traveling and being in a new place is now the norm.  The energy meridian line passes through a mountain on the east of town and I am planning on climbing it tomorrow.

Patagonia: A Landscape carved by wind and fire

Last night, riding the bus as the darkness was creeping out from the shadows where it laid hidden all day, it slowly slithered outwards conquering the last pockets of light, as the sun was gently falling behind the rippling waves of the mountainous Andes I sat searching ceaselessly for a view of Mt. Aconcagua.  I spotted it within moments, but the summit was submerged in clouds.  I could see Cerro Aconcagua looming high above the surrounding mountains.  It is indeed a sentinel among all of its children and siblings as it guards over the the west-central province of Mendoza.  The ridge lines leading to the summit from each side climb for miles upon miles, spanning great distances to reach its lofty, snow-crested summit. Unfortunately, I will have to wait till another time to climb it.  I have a feeling I will be back or. . .



On the bus last night I tried my first South American lasagna and it does not even compare to the forty-five dollar lasagna I love to cook.  I can't judge it since it was on a bus and not fine dining.  They not only fed us three meals on the bus, but they also served us a small glass of Malbec.  Quite delightful!  "Greyhound, you should take notes, you dumb racing mutt!"  I guess this is one of the benefits of traveling through wine country and paying the extra buck for the bang.

After dinner and a movie (nice second date, omnibus), I slowly dozed off as I watched flashes of lightning light up rectangular rooms before darkness swallowed up the light as if it never happened.  It wasn't bolts of lightning, but was more like balls of light.

Today, I awoke far form the spine of the Andes, the highway ribbons away from the mountains just to head back into them again later, further south.  The landscape reminded me of traveling through west Texas, western New Mexico, western Colorado, Wyoming, western Idaho, eastern California or eastern Oregon.  It is a high desert-plateau, with scrub brush such as creosote brush (that they use the oils for railroad ties), acacia or cat-claw, pampas grass, chaparral with flowers mixed in in bunches and trees lining the Rio Negra.  The plateau is called Baja Colorado.  Cows and horses grazed along the side of the road in a vast and sparse countryside.  The animals have to be careful grazing on some of these plants or they will injure their taste-bud apparatuses.  Almost every plant and bush has a built in weaponry to fend off being grazed too hard by evolving thorns, spikes, claws and poisons/toxins.  The cows and horses and deer must act like the giraffes of the east and south Africa where they slowly slither their tongues outwards grasping the green leaves of Acacia without getting poked.

I am not that impressed with their meager breakfasts of bread and butter or cereal with mermelade, juice, mate or coffee.  I am much more of bacon, eggs and toast kind of guy no matter the day of the week.  This is one of the freedoms of having a kitchen in a hostel where I don't have to eat the free breakfast food, unless I want and if I decide to cook this also allows me to save money by cooking in their kitchens.

Kites are the pre-dominant bird of prey species soaring and sailing low over the brush eagerly searching out small lizards, small rodents and small songbirds to peg with their piercing talons.  I think they are in the falcon family and are much smaller than red-tailed hawks and about the size of crows not Ravens. CAW!  They are  a little bit bigger than kestrels and not as big as their African cousins, which I once saw swoop down and steal a chicken wing from right out of the hand of Mike England (the magazine editor of "Outside Bozeman") in Ngorro-Ngorro Crater in Tanzania, Africa.

Hoping once I start trekking high in the Andes to spot an Andean Condor with their nearly ten foot wingspan.  Hopefully, it is not carrying a child in its talons.

Bicycle tourists are nearly at a crawl with the wind pushing them back and forth and off the road with each struggling pedal of their bike.  At times, I wish I had my Surly (a touring steel frame bike) with me, but seeing this I don't envy them at all.   Even the bus I am riding on struggles against the mighty Patagonian wind.  Bus drivers are like sea captains navigating that black ribbon of highway through blustery winds that hit their invisible sails causing the bus to sway back and forth.  A white volcanic ash and white sand coats the sky and ground.  Mt. Lanin has been spewing this white ash into the sky where the Patagonian wind blows it every which way causing visibility to be absolutely nil at times like a white-out.  Everyone I have met and talked to who have been down here as of late said be ready for the wind.  The plants adapted to the wind with their tough defense mechanisms and growing close to the ground and having deep tap roots to hold them in place.  I wonder if rain even hits the ground in this place or evaporates before it hits the ground.  Vultures effortlessly ride the rifts of wind forever searching for animals frozen in time as carcasses
along the side of the road.  Dust-devils whip and tornado across the landscape.

Traveling through the province of Rio Negro (a.k.a. the Lakes District) where humungous blue gems of water lay nestled amongst the folded ridges.  The white-sandy desert lies in sharp contrast to the blues of the lakes.  It almost doesn't seem possible or real to have this big of lakes or this many, but than again they are all glacially fed as the summer-time sun melts the remaining snows.  As we near the Andes the north-western shore's vegetation changes from scrub brush to tall Ponderosa Pine looking trees.  The green is a sweet relief for the eyes compared to the brightness of the white sand and ash.  Black sea-eagles hunt along the lakes for the abundance of trout in these waters.

The landscape is continuously being shaped, carved and sculpted into these stone statuettes leaving behind white pillars and spires that resemble deities, stone gargoyles or gryphons silently waiting for night to come so they can take flight.  Maybe the stone spires were once the above creatures, but are frozen in time by lava and are just remnants of a time gone past when dinosaurs also prowled and ravaged this landscape.  I am starting to see more familiar plants and flowers of the alpine and montane of some of which are the same in Montana like the lilac-colored lupine, wild rose bushes, mullein and other yellow flowers, which are maybe arnica.  I will have to figure it out when I am not two stories up in a bus.

I reflect back of the great people I met at the last hostel.  Waves of French in the beginning of my weeks stay, then Germans and Belgiums and then Americans.  I met Josh and Alice who Josh happens to work out in Washington D.C. for the national League of Conservation Voters, a group I am quite familiar with.  Two of my friends Heidi Marcum and Becky Edwards work or volunteer for them in Whitefish.

Semi trucks, buses and other automobiles sputter and moan climbing the folded ridges that the meandering highway climbs as their fan belts, engines, exhaust manifolds belch and cough out black smoke as their lungs breathe in that fine sand granules and molten ash and the wind kicks their ass.  The autos wince upon every uphill and downhill.  If Subarus and Toyotas are the state cars of Montana then Volkswagons are the car of choice here for efficiency and smallness in Patagonia

ADVENTURES of HUCKLEBERRY (Malbec) BEN: tour de vino via bicleta

Yesterday, I biked toured various wineries/bodgegas and a beer garden on the southern part of Mendoza, Argentina. The bodegas lie in the shadows of the Andes with the hot Argentinian sun concentrating its light into the three-lobed leaves of Cabernet-Sauvignon grape leaves and the five-lobed leave Malbecs.  I rented a mountain bike from Orange bike tours and yes, you guessed it was orange and I rode between wineries all afternoon starting at eleven o´clock in the morning.

First of all, I started riding south down the main road in town and took a left down Boca calle (street) to Trapiche winery, but it ended up being closed, so while I was there I decided to check out the El jardin de Cervecerro or beer garden.  It was located in this hippie enclave with tons of earthships (a building_style which uses cob (mud and straw) and/straw-bale.  I had two rojas or red colored beers here and some homemade chips.  I should have ended my trip here because it kind of ruined my taste buds for wine tasting, but not too bad.

Next I rode back to the main road then five miles south to a family owned winery called, ¨Familia de Tomaso¨.  This winery was somewhat of a small-scale production.  The family migrated  here back  in the mid to late 18th century from Italy.  Here I did a wine-tasting where we sampled four different wines; two Malbecs, a Cabernet Sauvignon (with hints of  chocolate, tobacco, coffee, oak and fruit) and a sweet wine made for eating chocolate and fine delectable pastries.

  After the tasting we went on a tour.  He took us out to the vineyards and explained the difference between the shape of the leaves of the Malbec (which is five-lobed leaf) and the Cabernet (which is a three-lobed leaf).  Then he took us out of the sweltering heat of the mid-day sun and we went through the factory.  He showed us where they store the bottled wines while it ages, then where they put it in oak barrels and then they put back in a closed, cool spot where no outside fragrances can enter through the cork changing the consistency of color, olfactory smell and/or the taste.

There I  met a brother and sister, Torrent and Portia from San Diego, CA.  He was a life guard and she was a Marine Biologist.

After the tour I rode north again to Cero De Vina and had a tasting of three different labeled wines from three smaller companies.  I tried one Malbec and a Cabernet from the lower quality wines and then tried a Malbec and a Cabernet from the higher quality, less mass produced wine with the name.  Here I ran into Portia and Torrent again and they were on bikes too so we rode and toured together the rest of the day.

After this we rode down the street to La Mevi, the last winery of the day.  This place was much more modern than the previous two.  We could have went to about ten more, but was getting late and quite buzzed.  We decided to forfeit the tour and buy two bottles; A Malbec and a Cabernet.  We drank it inside in the air-conditioned place and after the first bottle we decided  it was time to order water and food.  We ordered  empanadas.  After the last bottle we rode back with huge wine smiles to the bike rentals.

Wine growing is quite the science of pruning back the vines directly influencing the height of the vine you want, allowing the vine to grow horizontal or vertical for the most photosynthesis and trying to grow the perfect Malbec grape or  the perfect Cabernet Sauvignon grape.  Each vine or wine requires a lot of trial and error through direct and keen observation of producing the perfect color of wine, the perfect olfactory smell and most delectable taste and flavor.  All of these processes come from the right amount of  grapes, yeast, alcohol, sugars all the way to duration of time in the bottles for the chemistry and fermentation to happen, to the aging process in the oak barrels then back to the bottles.

Talking to Portia and Torrent I paid way too much for the tour.  I paid a whopping 120 pesos and they paid 25 pesos.  LIVE AND LEARN!

Today I leave Mendoza riding the 8:30 pm bus to Bariloche in the south,  but the northwestern part of Patagonia where the weather is cooler and sweeter.  I get there at 1:30 in the afternoon tomorrow.  My seat is in the upper level of the bus.  Sit back and watch the countryside go by.