La Querencia

How's everybody doing?  Things around here have been kind of slow I guess.  Our 2 week midterm period ends Friday, so we've all just been hanging out and studying a bit and going out a bunch at night.  My friends and I are taking the first week of classes after midterms off to go on a nice long trip to Patagonia.  Its going to be 10 days starting way down south in Calafate heading north up through Chalten, Bariloche, Villa Angostura, and San Martin de los Andes.  Look up Calafate on Google maps, its really far down there, almost at La Tierra del Fuego.  To everybody's pleasure and my partial dismay, the trip promises a ton of blog posting (also known as "lunch break literature" at Groner Service), so I figure I better catch up before I have new stories.

After returning from Mendoza on Monday morning, Dave, Max, and I crammed in a few quick classes and a nap or two before heading back off into the country again.  A friend of ours named Bel came over back in March with her other friends named Bel (the former known as Belen and the latter as Belu) and Clara.  Belu invited us to her campo (the Argentine word for estate/farm/massive property) named La Querencia near a little town about 5 hours away called Arias on the border of the Cordoba and Santa Fe provinces.  We all took a bus up to Arias late Thursday night, arriving at about 5am.  As Belu drove from the bus station to the house in the dark we couldn't really tell what the campo looked like or how big it was.  When we woke up later in the day around 10, we got our first glimpse of it.


Belu told us the whole thing was 2000 hectares.  For those of you who are bad at math or have no idea what a hectare is, that's almost 5000 acres, or 7.72 square miles.  For those of you who would like a geographical comparison, that's one-third the size of Manhattan, or 235.35 times bigger than Aunt Suzy and Uncle Eric's piece of sod.  It's massive.  If you look at my pictures of our weekend, there is not a single picture that shows any other land in it other than her family's, even the ones where the horizon looks a million miles away.


There is a big old mansion in the middle of the property where some of her family members live.  There are other houses and buildings and structures scattered about the property where workers live or where tools/grain/things are kept as well.  Around the mansion there is a garage, big windmill, tennis court, picnic area, and tons of grass.  There's also a fenced off farm where horses and cows are kept.  Its really a cool place.  There's also a couple of dogs living around the farm, two of which stayed with us the whole weekend.  One is an adorable beagle named Holly and the other was a black lab.  We didn't know the lab's name so we called him Negro (not the American word negro, but negro as in the Spanish word for black).


On Friday we had breakfast in the big dining room (there's a lady or two that comes everyday to cook for everybody) and then went to play some tennis.  We took a break and had lunch on the back patio overlooking the huge lawn and a ton of farmland where they grow soy and corn.  We enjoyed the perfect weather and serenity and got our minds off of this stressful life we're living for a bit, it was great.  After lunch we played a little bit more tennis as a farm hand rounded up some horses for us.


We got changed into some gaucho clothes (one of my tshirts, some super comfy horse riding pants, and a cool hat i found) then headed over to help saddle up the horses.  I had never truly ridden a horse before, so the gigantic masses of muscle scared the crap out of me.  As I stood back afraid of walking near them for fear of being kicked or something, our experienced gaucho Max went to work with the farmhand.  For those of you who don't know, Max is our French/American friend who goes to school at Tufts in Boston.  He worked as an actual gaucho on an even bigger farm in Uruguay for like 6 weeks before coming to Buenos Aires, so he did really know what he was doing.


Eventually the horses were ready and we all hopped on.  We got 15 seconds worth of instruction on how to "control" the horse, and everybody started going.  I was in a near panic, so when they told me to kick it to get it to walk, I hesitated just a bit.  The guy smacked its butt and it started off.  It was super uncomfortable and I had no idea what I was doing, so everybody just walked slowly for about 15 minutes.  Max, Belu, and Dave got impatient and started running around the fields a bit.  Eventually I worked up some courage and gave my horse another kick.  It went into a trot, and I bounced up and down, hanging onto the reigns for dear life, as my butt and adjoined parts were smashed flat.  The group continued on (probably for a couple of miles) until we reached a big reservoir.  We rested there for a bit and watched the little beagle Holly bound through the grass that was a foot taller than her (she actually stayed with us the entire time on the 3 hour ride).


We started heading back by going the long way around the property.  Max eventually pressured me into trying a semi-gallop or gallop if I had the courage.  I got some decent speed, but was really scared so I stopped.  I practiced a few more times, and eventually Max and I reached a long straight strip of grass mowed through the field.  The horses know the property pretty well, so they knew we were heading back and started becoming hard to control because they wanted to go home.  Max took off down the strip at full speed and my horse immediately followed, without even warning me.  I actually hit a full sprint!  It was so cool to feel the horse running and breathing heavy underneath me as he just tore through the field.


Eventually we got back, unsaddled the horses, hosed them off, and brought them back to their field.  The saddle and 185lbs of person on their back must be pretty annoying because every single one of them immediately laid down, rolled onto their backs, and did that wiggle thing that dogs do to scratch their back.  It was really funny to see giant horses doing it.


We showered off, relaxed a bit, and had dinner.  Afterward we just sat around and relaxed some more on the back patio.  The nearest city is really far away, and the sky was absolutely filled with stars.  The air was crystal clear and it was super silent.  I haven't been that relaxed since Long Beach Island, which is saying something.


Saturday held more adventures, but its getting late, I need to study more, and my fingers are tired.  I'll finish up tomorrow.  Click the link above for pictures!!!


Oh, and one last thing- as much as I appreciate my mother's comments (thanks mom), I get tons of those without this blog.  I really would like to hear from the other people who are reading this (I would like to thank Tracy for her funny comments, and the one comment Aunt Carole left me).  I spend a ton of time doing this, and I always wonder who is actually reading it.  I leave Flat Evan pictures up all the time, and I never hear from my beloved Godfather or his rascal sons in New Jersey to know if they're getting the pictures.  Que frustrante!  Anyway, here's a quick guide on how to leave comments:


Step 1: At the end of each post, it says for example: Posted by Dan Alfano at 7:23 PM 0 comments.  Click the part where it says "0 comments" (not right here, but at the end of a post).

Step 2: It will take you to a screen that says "Post a comment" with a white box under it.  Write your comment in the box.  Then under the box it says "Comment as:", select "Anonymous" from the list.  Since you're posting anonymously I will have no idea who wrote the comment, so make sure you say who you are in the comment.  Hit "Post comment". 

Step 3: You will be taken to a similar screen.  Under the comment box it will say "Word verification."  Just copy the funny looking letters into the box below, and again it "Post comment."  You're done!  Thanks in advance for your thoughts!


Hasta luego.

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!

El Rio Mendoza: Cold enough to freeze the mustache right off your face

After sleeping peacefully Thursday night, we woke up early on Friday to head out on our best adventure yet- whitewater rafting and camping.  The company, named Ser_O Outdoors, picked us up from our hostel around 830am and drove for about an hour through the desert and mountains to its home camp.  When we got there, there was reggae playing, a bunch of hippies playing hippie games, some dogs running around, and a tiki bar.  We were approached by a smiley young guy with curly dreadlocks, who introduced himself as Juan Pablo our lead guide for the trip, and another spacey kind of guy named Kiké (pronounced keekay) who was our other guide.  They went over some logistics of the trip: prepare everything for our trip, drive to the river, load the rafts, and head out on the Rio Mendoza.  Friday night we were to camp out in an abandoned train station in the desert, then pack up again Saturday morning and finish our trip down the river.

They asked for our sleeping bags to be loaded into the cargo containers first, but we were just tourists in a strange city, so of course we didn't have sleeping bags.  Juan Pablo panicked a bit and thought we were kidding, but we weren't.  He warned us that in the desert it gets down to about 50 degrees and windy at night.  We told him we had sweatpants and sweatshirts, but he was still worried so he scrapped up every blanket, towel, table cloth, etc. that he could find for us to use as blankets.  We packed everything up, fitted ourselves with super thin and ripped wetsuits, helmets, life vests, booties, jackets, etc, went through a quick explanation of proper rafting procedures, and headed off.


After another hour drive through the mountains, we pulled off the road a bit to a small bank next to the river.  We changed into our rafting suits, packed everything securely into the raft, and dropped the raft in the river.  This was the first point at which we found out what river water from the Andes mountains is like- unimaginably cold.  I mean really cold.  We pushed off the bank in our two rafts and then learned about the winds moving through the river's canyon- super strong and also absurdly cold.  We paddled/rode the current for a while before encountering our first set of rapids.  Since it was the river's low season the water was a little low and not moving as fast, we really only faced class 3 rapids the whole time (rapids go from class 1 to 5, 5 being the roughest).  Nonetheless, the raft bounced and spun and we all hung on for fear of falling in the river (our friend Agustin actually did and Juan Pablo had to throw him a line to pull him back to the boat), and waves of water dumped over us constantly.  It was really really fun.  After about an hour or 2 on the river, we pulled onto a tiny little bank and set up for lunch.  We had coolers with plenty of sandwich supplies, granola bars, and drinks, so we all ate heartily and tried to thaw out.

We headed back out for another hour or 2 before the sun started to set, then pulled onto another bank.  As Juan Pablo said, "Unload quick, we need to find firewood before we run out of daylight."  Comforting.  We dragged all of the equipment up a hill to where we saw our home for the night- a bunch of old abandoned and crumbling buildings in the middle of the desert.  We changed our clothes and headed out.  Almost everything you find in a desert like the one we were in is tiny little thorn bushes and tumbleweed, nothing good to burn.  We found a few tree branches around, and eventually resorted to tearing the roof of one building apart to get some wood.  Nobody has used these buildings in a long long time, so the walls and roofs and everything are essentially ruins.  We carried everything back to camp, and then used railroad ties from the tracks that are still there to create a nice circle of benches around a fire pit that we built out of rocks we had found.

As the sun set, we set up our tents inside the semi-walls of the house we picked to stay in (in the Mendoza album its the building with the word "Guido" on it, obviously).  Our guides cut up vegetables and a few chickens, then threw it all in a big pot with some chicken broth and rice.  As the food slow-cooked for an hour or 2, we drank the 12 liters of wine our guides had also brought for us, played games, looked at the stars, and chatted.  It was really really peaceful and fun.  There are an incredible amount of stars in the desert sky- it literally looked white.  We saw a shooting star that lasted about 3 full seconds and went literally from one side of the sky to the other.  We ate the food and some cookies for dessert as we watched the moon rise over the rim of the mountains.  At some point we headed to bed, cramming up to 5 people in 2 person tents under a ton of blankets to keep warm.  It was extraordinarily uncomfortable.


We woke up sometime in the morning, no idea what time.  We ate some more cookies for breakfast, packed up, got back into our freezing cold and wet clothes for the raft, and head out again.  We met with some of our other friends who were only doing a 1 day trip at the bank where we tied up the rafts.  The 3 rafts headed down river for about 2 hours, going through a bunch more rapids, and one small waterfall until we reached the lake that the river ended in.  It was by far the bluest lake I've ever seen- it almost looked like they dyed the water.  A van was waiting for us at the end and after packing the rafts onto the trailer we headed back to camp.  After showering and changing into dry clothes, we ate an asado that the company has for all rafters after their trip.  We headed back to the hostel around maybe 6 and it took us until about 9pm to finally warm up again (we got off the rafts around 2 or 3).


We napped and then hung out around the hostel for the rest of the night, playing cards, pool, and charades, eating pizza, and having some drinks.  My friends headed to bed and I stayed up talking with a guy from Chile for about an hour or 2, and another kid from Manhattan came in and sat with us.  The 3 of us spoke (in Spanish because the guy from CHile didn't speak English) until we couldn't keep our eyes open anymore, then went to bed.


Sunday we went on some more adventures, highlights include: mountain climbing, rappeling, tarantulas, hot springs, and churros.  Stay tuned.

PS- I took this picture from my balcony at about 6am this morning:

The sunrise over Buenos Aires.  I couldn't stay awake any longer to take a better one, but this was gorgeous.

Mendoza!!! Part 1

Mendozaaaaaa, the land of cool outdoorsy stuff and second home of reggae music.  My friends and I headed to Mendoza, a city near the west coast of Argentina, for the end of March/first weekend in April.  We had heard a lot of cool stuff about it beforehand, and it certainly matched up to the stories.  My friends headed there on Tuesday night (its also a 15 hour bus ride) and arrived around noon on Wednesday, when they rented bikes and road them around the city.  Allie and I had class on Wednesday that we couldn't miss, so we took a bus late on Wednesday and arrived Thursday at noon.  We headed to the hostel and settled ourselves in, then headed right back out for the famous bicycle-wine tours.  Mendoza is Argentina's equivalent of the Napa Valley, except it looks way more like a desert with way less pretty countryside, and so offers plenty of wine tours and tasting.  Unanimously voted the most fun way to take the tours is on a bicycle.

We headed to the famous Mr. Hugo's, where you rent bicycles for the day for 15 pesos and then Mr. Hugo gives you plenty of free wine before you head out.  Mr. Hugo sent us off with a big smile and nod of encouragement, and we headed a few miles down the road to our first winery.  We heard a 3 minute description of the winery, explored it a bit, then tasted some wine.  At this point everybody was feeling pretty happy and excited to ride their bikes some more, so we rode for a while around the wineries and down the long desert roads.  We took some pictures and stole some grapes off of these huge dump-trucks that were overflowing with them, then headed to the next winery stop.

At our second stop there was a deal where you pay 20 pesos and taste 4 full glasses of whatever types of wines and/or champagnes you want.  Needless to say we all took advantage of that.  Everything we tasted at this place was excellent, and the weather was beautiful, so we bought a bunch of bottles of different wines and sat out in the grass next to the vineyard for a bit.  As we talked and drank and had an awesome time, the winery was closing and the owners decided we were not exactly in "bicycle riding condition" for the "busy" roads around us.  So they called Mr. Hugo.  And the police.  This was all unbeknownst to us, so when Mr. Hugo came with his pickup and began throwing our bikes in the back, and when the police came in two paddywagons and threw us in the back, we were a little surprised.  Apparently this is a normal occurrence, so the police were very cool and took pictures of us cuffed together while drinking wine in the van.  Everybody was shuttled back to Mr. Hugo's, where there was a ton of more free wine waiting for us, and the police reluctantly declined the offer to join us.  We danced and drank and laughed a ton with Mr. Hugo before he walked us to the bus, which he paid for all of us to take back to the hostel.

We were pretty exhausted when we got back to the hostel, so we showered and napped.  We then took a taxi to an asado/party that the hostel was having for guests at a nearby park.  We never RSVP'd about the asado so we had to sneak in and steal some food.  After some food and drinks, we hung out on the playground, riding swings and some ride that spun really fast for a bit, then went home and passed out.  It was a super fun day.


Early the next day we embarked on a 2-day whitewater rafting/camping adventure.  More on that tomorrow.  Click here to see my Mendoza album.  Sidenote:  I forgot to mention that the guys and I decided that the theme of this trip was "Mustache Mendoza", so you may notice that I have some ridiculous looking facial hair in these pictures.  For those of you that like history, this style of facial hair, was invented by (and named after) the 21st president of the United States of America, Chester A. Arthur.  I have no pictures of the police and Mr. Hugo in that album, so I'll post them here.

All of us with the cops and Mr. Hugo (just left of center in the black shirt)

 Apparently we have different definitions of "bicycle riding condition".

Not as fun as riding bikes.

Talk to you tomorrow!

Mas Fotos

I promise I will try to post tonight.  The problem with posting right now is timing because midterms start on Tuesday, and as you can probably tell with all my travels and fun, I haven't done much work this semester.  The next week will be morning to night studying, and so these posts (which take way longer than you'd expect) will be hard to squeeze in.  I am adding a bunch more pictures to Photobucket though, just to keep the masses entertained.  I'll add more from Mendoza, my trip to Tigre, Uruguay, Carnavale, and whatever else I can find.  The thing is its easy to upload pictures as I work, its just that writing the posts is mutually exclusive with studying.  The link to the pictures is in my last post.

Sneak Preview!

I can imagine my lack of posts has driven several people to insanity at this point.  Unfortunately, I'm not here to post for real right now as its 110am and I have class early tomorrow.  I am here, however, to give everybody a sneak preview of several very exciting posts I will soon write about our incredible trip to Mendoza, the Alfano family visit to Buenos Aires, and this past weekend I spent at my friend's estate in the middle of farm country.  Hopefully nothing exciting will happen before I finish writing about all of it, because then I would likely never catch up.
Now for the sneak preview!  Click here for new albums entitled "Mendoza" and "La Querencia".  The Mendoza pictures are only from one night for now, but tomorrow I'll be uploading plenty more.  Enjoy!

Salta continued

Sorry its been a while, I just got back from a trip to Mendoza.  I'll finish up about the Salta trip now before I forget everything.  I'll post on Mendoza asap.

Monday we went on another day long van trip, ultimately to a place called Humahuaca.  To be honest, this was the worst day and was a little boring.  We hit Purmamarca again, then a bunch more little desert pueblos, then finally the tiny pueblo of Humamuaca where nothing was happening.  At the first pueblo, there was a small llama farm and ancient indian ruins.  We were taking pictures of the llamas and one seemed to be a little bothered.  Malcolm decided to cheer him up and leaned in toward the fence and said "Gimme a kiss buddy".  Of course, the llama spit right in his face and the rest of us rolled around laughing for about 30 minutes.  I got a video of him doing it again, I'll see what I can do about posting it.  After the llamas we explored the ruins- a bunch of old adobe houses in the middle of a ton of cactus, not too exciting.

Afterward, we went to another pueblo for lunch.  We ordered some stuff we'd never heard of, including llama meat.  Its actually really good and tastes like barbecue smoked beef brisket.  We explored the town in the 400 degree heat and sun (me and Brenny found a basketball court, but no ball), then got back in the van.  On the way home we stopped at the Tropic of Capricorn.  It was just a big sun dial, also not very exciting.

Tuesday was our last trip in Salta.  We went to a place called Cafayate, Salta's wine country and home of the famous Malbec wine.  Unfortunately my camera died at the Tropic of Capricorn so I have no pictures of my own of Cafayate.  On the way there we stopped at a few cool rock formations in the desert.  One was called the Devil's Throat, a huge crevice created by a waterfall years ago.  We climbed over a ton of rocks to the back of the cave where an enormous wall was.  The wall was on about a 60 degree angle (super super steep) and we climbed as far up as we could before getting yelled at.  After we continued on to Cafayate.  We went to 2 wineries for some tasting, then lunch (where nobody ate much because we were all sick again), then headed back home.  Every night we just chilled in the hostel because we were tired and burnt from the sun and long car rides, so no stories there.

A few pictures from the last 2 days, click to enlarge:

A llama at the farm.  This one was nice and didn't spit at anybody.

Flat Evan exploring ancient Argentine ruins!

A giant staircase and monument of Liberty I think.  Between the sun and altitude I almost passed out when I got to the top.  We found the bball court behind the monument.

Flat Evan at the Tropic of Capricorn!

The BC group at the giant wall in the Devil's Throat.  This picture does it no justice as far as size or steepness goes.

This one does.  If you look closely, you can see Malcolm along the left side in the green tshirt.  The thing was huge.

A vineyard in Cafayate.  The rest of our pictures from here are just us standing around sipping wine.  I figured this was better.

Epic tales from our incredible trip to Mendoza coming soon!  Click here for a special surprise!  I'll have Mendoza pictures up soon too!