Mendoza Part 3

Hey everybody.  Took my first two of three midterms Tuesday and yesterday.  Art History, the class that I thought was going to ruin me, went surprisingly well.  My history and culture of Argentina class also went really well, although everybody in the class seems to have written about double what I did.  We'll see how that goes.  Now I'm hangin out and studying until my Business Organizational Theory test on Wednesday, which shouldn't be too hard.  Now to wrap up Mendoza-

Sunday we signed up for a hiking, rappelling, and hot spring trip.  We were picked up once again early in the morning and drove for about 30 minutes to the base of a small mountain (but already at about 8000ft of altitude).  We got out of the van and our guide, a short gap-toothed man with a zany smile, handed us helmets and climbing harnesses.  We started up a path along the mountain which wasn't very steep, and our guide pointed at least several hundred feet up to a pointy peak and said that was where we were going.  He led us off the path and up onto a pretty steep ridge made of big rocks and small desert plants.  At this point we were literally almost climbing the mountain rather than hiking it.  We continued a few minutes at a time, stopping every once in a while so we could catch our breath and rest our legs (they were burning from the climbing and the altitude was killing us).  Eventually we reached that pointy peak.  The view was absolutely incredible as it looked out over a bunch of other mountains and valleys.

We took some pictures at the edge of a cliff, and then our guide told us to put our harnesses on as we were going to start our descent.  We walked down another ridge on the other side of the mountain which was just as steep and with small loose rocks all over the place.  It was super difficult climbing down as we were slipping all over and trying to avoid cactus all over the place.  My friend Madeleine was walking and suddenly jumped and screamed, scaring all of us.  She called everybody over as she looked down in horror at a massive tarantula that was standing right on the rock in front of her.  As it ran across the rock to hide, it almost doubled in size to more or less as big as my fully-stretched hand.  We took some pictures and kept moving.

After about 3 more minutes we reached our first cliff.  Our guide set up the ropes and anchors and everything to some clips bolted into some rocks, then gave us our instructions, "Just hold onto the rope and lean back really far.  Then just walk backwards down the wall"  Seems easy, until you realize that laying backwards horizontally over 50ft of nothing with only a rope holding you is a little scary.  Dave went first and got down safely, almost eliminating some of our fear.  I went towards the end.  It actual was pretty easy, its just a scary feeling so your body tenses up and you don't move smoothly.  We hiked another few minutes to a second cliff only about 20 or 30 feet tall.  Finally we reach the last cliff of 150 feet.  It was soooo high.  I wasn't too nervous until I leaned back to horizontal, the first point that I could even see over the edge of the cliff.  Everybody below me seemed to be a mile away.  Everything went fine, it just seemed to take an hour to get down (it was really like 3 or 4 minutes).

We changed out of our harnesses and hiked the last 100 feet of the mountain and then down the road a bit.  We then reached the last part of the day- hot springs.  There is a big spa center with tons of pools, hot tubs, and saunas for people to enjoy in the mountain air.  Lunch was provided for us, so we ate heartily and then changed into our bathing suits and headed straight for one of the big stone hot tubs.  It felt unbelievable.  After killing our bodies with bicycles, wine, rafting, camping in the desert, more rafting, hiking, climbing, and rappelling, the spa is really what we needed.  We moved around to some of the different pools outside, all overlooking those incredible views described before.

Malcolm and I saw our friends in a pool down next to the Rio Mendoza (it ran right next to the spa), so we found a waterslide and took it down to them.  They were in a 1 foot deep little pool, next to a big circular pool with a giant man-made geyser in the middle.  We decided to have a relay race- each team member has to get out of the little pool, run around the base of the geyser, and come back before the next person can go.  The catch was, the giant pool was filled with the freezing cold river water (remember the river is supplied by melting snow and ice at the peaks of the Andes), the water at the base of the geyser was about 4 feet deep, and the geyser was a long way around.  The losing team had to do the whole thing again.  Much to my chagrin, my team lost.


We headed back up to the warm pools for a bit and relaxed some more.  Malcolm had his waterproof camera, so we took some funny underwater pictures.  The time came to leave, so we grabbed some smoothies, churros, and fried dough that a lady was selling, and headed back to our hostel.  We hung out for a bit before heading to the bus station to go home.  It was a really incredible weekend, one of the best trips I've ever taken in my life.  We did tons of cool outdoorsy stuff and had fun 110% of the time.


We were home for 3 and a half days before heading out again on our next adventure- La Querencia.  Those stories soon to come!  Click here for pictures of Mendoza!