The two craziest weeks of our trip

As Buenos Aires faded into our rearview mirror, we excitedly awaited our coming weekend in Mendoza. We had skipped the wine capital of Argentina so far on our trip, but were excited to plunge into the Malbecs, Cab Sauvs, and other great wines the region is famous for. The drive across the country was unexceptional as we motored along busy highways that were of high quality. The only real hassle was making sure we had our perishable foods hidden in the fridge as we were stopped at several state border checkpoints. Thankfully a combination of city living and craftiness allowed most of our things to get through unscathed. Driving into Mendoza, we could quickly see that the wine tour experience here would be different from Cayfayate, as the city is much larger, the traffic greater, and the city more spread out. There was a clear gearing of things towards tourists, and tour buses in particular.

"Welcome to Mendoza, the land of the sun and of the good wine"

We made our way through the outskirts of the city towards a campsite that had good reviews and would be a nice basecamp for us and our friends. Happy to see signs advertising the campsite, we followed them down a bumpy gravel road towards the site. We pulled in, and immediately saw the complex was HUGE, made to hold hundreds during the summer, with overnight and picnic campsites, a pool, playground, the whole shebang. The owner pointed out where we could grab a spot, which wasn't difficult because the place was empty being low season. We settled in, unpacked, and messaged our friends Colin and Aurielie. Being a bustling tourist metropolis, we moseyed over to the grocery store to load up on wine and grill meat to celebrate the evening. Returning to the campsite, we saw the bright blue “Dodge Experience” parked near our site. We first met Colin and Aurielie in Guatemala, and last saw each other in Cusco Peru, where Aurelie and Bethany's families joined us for drinks. Colin was wearing his trademark smile, and we chatted about life on the road since we'd last met as we began unloading. In true French fashion, they encouraged us to spend the afternoon playing a wine game, where we covered the wine bottles and attempted to guess the color, blend, age, and type of the wine blind. Bethany and I, being novices, considered getting the color correct a win for us. Colin and Aureiele, being experts, would try to guess if it was a blend. By the end of the fourth bottle, it didn't matter if you were right or not.

Perusing the different dulce de leche options

socks and wine bottles. Ahh....France.

“What's going on? Why are you getting up?” a half-asleep Bethany asked me in the middle of the night. “Nothing, just checking something out.” I replied to her. As I was drifting off to sleep, headlights swept across the tent and I heard the rumble of an engine, that then went into idle, with the lights aimed near where Sweetcakes was. As they sat there for over a minute, I started to get worried; were we being scoped out? Was someone breaking into Sweetcakes? I hopped out of the tent, and saw a couple in an SUV periodically outlined by the headlights as they walked in front of the vehicle. Overlanders? But it's late at night, and overlanders wouldn't come into a campsite this late! Nevertheless, satisfied, I crawled back into the tent and settled down for the evening.

“So, we can rent bicycles from this place?” Bethany asked no one in particular as she looked at the gate to a nice house with a lawn in Mendoza. At that moment, the old man sitting against the fence looking into the distance perked up and inquired if we were looking to rent bikes. We said we were, and he cheerfully got us bikes, bottles of cold water, and gave us a long run-down on great places to check out during the day. We formulated our plan, and kicked off our wine tour.....by going to an olive oil factory. This was fine though as we got the private tour, learned about their process for making it, and celebrated surviving the tour by having varied flavored oils over bread, as well as olive tapenades and spicy sundried tomatoes. Leaving the first place with a full basket wasn't a great idea, but we knew our future selves would thank us for being so smart.

Biking to a winery? Awww yisss.

Yes. Please.

Olive presses

From there the wine tours started, and we didn't feel so bad about the wine we were drinking as we had to haul ourselves so far across town to get to them. It was serious work on the old bikes and Bethany and I quickly realized that we were seriously out of our biking form. The wineries were nice, but we realized that many of them brought their torrontes grapes down from Cafayate as the altitude in Mendoza was too low to make the Malbecs and Torrones pop with color and flavor. Let's be clear though, the wine wasn't bad, particularly when we were wrapping up our last tasting of the day and Aurielie poured her last two out after tasting them. Bethany and I shot each other looks as if to say, “The wine has to be pretty bad for either of us to do that!” But we're just unsophisticated Americans, not classy French. After a long day of drinking and eating, we returned the bikes and settled down at the rental shop to have our free celebratory glass of wine. Tired and hot from the biking, we naturally took the chilled white to help us rehydrate. [That's how it works, right?] Returning to the campsite, we had a chance to introduce ourselves to the overlanders who had arrived the previous evening that I initially thought were devious thieves. Kevin and Emma are an Australian couple making their way north from Buenos Aires. We actually knew they were in the area from Facebook, after learning about their unfortunate break-in early on in their trip where thousands of dollars of gear and photography equipment was stolen. “It was just an absolutely crap week.” Emma explained of the time leading up the break-in. “I hope the assholes got the bedbugs we'd just caught.” she said with pure vindictiveness in her voice. Frankly, I couldn't blame her. That evening we fired up the 'barbie' [seriously, Bethany could not stop making 'barbie' jokes with her terrible Australian accent.] and did homestyle parrilla, enjoying some of the wine we'd just purchased as well as some cold brews. A great way to celebrate great trips.

I'll take 2.

"And remember a meal without wine is breakfast!"  truer words were never spoken.

"Age only matters for cheese and wine"

Doin' it ourselves. 

We bid farewell to Colin and Aurelie the next morning, promising them we would come visit them in France at their guesthouse and try the wine that's unique to their town. [Really, what a burden it would be!] We also told Kev & Em that we were making our way to Cafayate and to look us up when they got there, as we'd love to meet up again!

9th and final meetup!

“Hey guys, I was looking at my itinerary for my flight down there. It looks like my flight into Buenos Aires and my flight to Salta are at different airports?” came the question over the phone from my Mom a few days before her visit with us started. “What? No. We looked into it and made sure that when bought your ticket they were at the same airport.” came Bethany's reply. “Oh, ok, well, let me forward you my itinerary so you can verify. Whew, I was worried!” Bethany and I sat in Sweetcakes in the parking lot of a grocery store in Mendoza, on our way out of town, waiting for the e-mail to complete it's forwarding. After arrival, Bethany opened it up. “Well shit.” was enough to let me know that indeed, she was going to need to make a transfer between the airports. “We'll call you back mom, we need to figure this out.” The two airports in Buenos Aires are across the entire city, with one focusing on international flights and the other on domestic. There thankfully was a shuttle between the two, but it would likely take so long she would miss her connection. We then spent the next few hours trying to call the Aerolineas Argentinias help line to change her ticket, while also realizing that phone calls on our Argentinian SIM card were ruinously expensive. 14$ later in fees, and 6 attempted calls that had either been dropped because of an empty balance or poor signal, we finally had her ticket changed and her shuttle booked. We explained to her what she'd need to do to get between the airports, and wished her the best of luck as we continued our way north to Salta to pick her up in a few days.

We made a tough to decision to skip part of the scenic drive along Ruta 40, as the route had been under construction our last time through the area. We ended up being validated in this choice, as we discovered later that the road was in really rough shape and Kev and Em tried it not long after us.

A sweet German rig 

We spent a quick [half?] day in Cafayate to scope out places to stay when mom arrived. Several places looked great, and we enjoyed getting to stay in the Luz y Fuerza campground again. During the drive up to Salta the following morning, we anxiously awaited a phone call from my mom with updates on how her transfer between the airports went. We hadn't heard anything, but finally noticed a missed call from a number we didn't recognize and a voicemail. Realizing we hadn't set up our voicemail on the phone yet, we quickly got through the setup to listen to our message, which was Mom calling us to let us know she'd been able to get on an earlier flight and would be arriving at two instead of at eight. YESSSSS!

She made it!

Crammed into Sweetcakes!

After hugs and happiness with her arrival, we made our way back into Salta and to our boutique hotel for the evening. We were greeted with a glass of wine and a beautiful room for us to share for the night. Bethany and I went to park the car at the secure lot nearby the lobbyists directed us to, but saw it was closed. Driving around, we attempted to find another, but to no avail. Eventually we rolled back to the front of the hotel and checked in with them. “So, we can't find parking, is it safe to park in front of the hotel?” we asked, with caution in our voices. There were reports from other overlanders that smash and grabs against tourists were increasing in Salta, and the last thing we wanted was to go through another burglary. “No, it will be fine!” the staff assured us. So, with a bit of trepidation, we left Sweetcakes out front, but made sure to take in all the important valuables, and hid some other stuff in Sweetcakes, and crossed our fingers.

We took a stroll around the nearby plaza, took mom out to some delicious fast food, and helped her settle in to her first night in Argentina! We awoke the next morning and went down to breakfast, and happily saw that Sweetcakes was fine. We packed up, excited to roll down to Cafayate for wine tastings! We tossed our bags I the car and checked out. We were parked across from a school, and had noticed the students out and about along the second and third story balconies. Returning to the car, Bethany remarked that the students seemed to notice a commotion that was going on below them. “Looks like someone got in trouble....” she said with a bit of a sing-song to her voice like a kid would have. At that same moment, I was putting the key into the door and noticed it wasn't fitting. “Son of a bitch, we were just broken into!!” I said out loud. As I was processing that, someone came up to us and asked if the vehicle was ours. “Yes” we replied. “Some men broke into it, but the police caught them. They're over there.” the person told us, pointing to the two men with their hands behind their backs against the fence of the school.

Thinking back to when we'd dropped our stuff in the car a few minutes earlier, I remember turning to look as I heard a car making the sound of a hard acceleration in reverse and thinking to myself, “man, they're really in a rush to get into that parking spot.” and realizing now it was the thieves parking to break into our car. I was furious, but was happy to learn that since they had been caught, our stuff was fine. After a few minutes, Bethany had the idea to check the car for our stuff, and lo and behold, the guys had gotten in. We were angry at ourselves because normally our valuables are tucked underneath the bed platform specifically to protect it if we had a break-in, but were all still in the backpack from when we'd brought it into the hotel.

A plains-clothes police officer told us they'd caught the guys, and asked us to take the time to press charges as the men were known to target tourists. We agreed. Bethany got frustrated when we saw local TV news reporters showing up; they wanted to do an interview but I couldn't speak Spanish and Bethany didn't want to. Pulling her aside, I said to her, “this is an opportunity for us to tell the people of Salta how tourists like us know it's not safe for us here and let them know what overlanders think about their city.” Reluctantly, she agreed, and started talking to the reporter. The reporter was excited to have a gringo [and a blond!] who knew Spanish to interview, but as I watched them chat from the side, I could tell he was quickly getting bored. It was his own fault though, as he kept asking elaborately long questions to Bethany that only required one word answers. “So, those men over there broke into your car and stole your stuff?” “....Yes.” “And the police caught them and got your stuff back and you're happy?” “....Yes.” Finally though, he finally asked a bit of an open-ended question and Bethany took the opportunity to dive in. I distinctly remember seeing the reporter's eyes perk up and then his attention focus as he realized he had some good TV coming. “Well, it's just sad because we love Argentina and its people, but it's so sad that Salta isn't safe for tourists like us! We're leaving Salta today and aren't coming back!” Bethany told the reporter. Gold Jerry, GOLD! 

Eventually they took us over to the getaway car, with the thieves still up against the wall near us. In one of the single best moments of our trip, there was the ludicrous scene of the police dramatically opening the trunk of the car and the cameramen jumping forward and zooming in on the view of our two bags there, followed by the police taking our stuff out of the bags piece by piece to itemize on the police report, and one of the thieves muttering “this is crazy!” as he got drug to the front of the car, bumping Bethany and saying, “excuse me Miss” to her. From there we went to the police station to file the official report and get our stuff back, where one of the plains-clothes cops told us how he saw the men break into the vehicle from 50m away, sprinted down to him and put him in a headlock and tossed him to the ground. It was a dramatic reenactment he gave us. From there, we made our way over to the Judicial Palace [court house] to press charges and finally headed out, half our day gone. “Well, now at least you got a taste of real overlanding!” We joked with mom. The day could only go up, and it quickly did as we took the drive through the valley between Salta and Cafayate.

ENJOY JAIL, SUCKAS

The drive we remembered as gorgeous still was. It started with green farmland on the way out of the city, where we eventually stopped to grab mom some coca-cola. “This tastes weird...” was the first thing she said upon trying it. “Yeah, they use real sugar down here. It's awesome.” was our immediate reply. Once we made it to the entry of the valley, the green swapped out to browns and reds, and the sun started to break through the clouds. We paused to take a short hike, then continued down to Cafayate. Mom marveled at the stunning views of the mountains and rock formations, and the sky cleared up as we came out of the pass into the Cafayate valley.

We were still worked up over the theft I guess....

SO STEEP.  what a bunch of goofballs

Driving into Cafayate

"Is...is that guy filming us?" Mom asked as we left Garganta del Diablo. [pictured above].  We started giggling as a local tourist was trying unsuccessfully to film us sneakily because we were speaking English.  It was creepy and quite funny. 

We found a nice cabana to stay at and worked on finding a locksmith to tend to Sweetcakes. Not wanting the day to go to waste though, we made sure to grab some wine.

The drive out to Domingo Molina

Ah yes, this is the heaven I remember

The following day we took it easy and went to just a couple wineries, including our personal favorite, Domingo Molina. As we made our way up to the central plaza at the end of our day, I saw a familiar vehicle parked: Roger! Kev and Em's Nissan Patrol! We went over and said hello again, introduced our mom. The five of us agreed to reconvene the next day to do some additional touring together, and we did, hitting up several of the in-town wineries we could walk to. Enjoying yet more wine, and super cheap tastings, we settled in for lunch. As lunch was wrapping up, we heard the strong stoke of a big diesel engine, as Kev looked over and quipped, “huh, Colorado plates..” Wait, Colorado overlanders? Don't we know some people fro—OH MY GOD IT'S AJ AND KAT!!! For discerning readers, you may recall we met them back in Guatemala when we hung out with Dan and Heather. We introduced them to my mom, Kev, and Emma and caught up. Super excited, we decided that further wine tours would now be done in large group to facilitate happiness. We celebrated this great decision by going out to dinner that evening and drinking lots of wine. Bethany was in “rare form” as they put it to us.

Argentinian Lunch [dinner] with Kev & Em in Cafayate

Nothing like morning wine tours

Century Old Vines

Coming into El Esteco

The group at a pretty posh winery

Celebratory dinner for surviving a couple of days together.  Celebrate with wine.

Everyone crammed into Sweetcakes.  We didn't get pulled over.  MIRACLES

As the only couple that had been through Cafayate previously, we made sure to take everyone to our favorites, again making a trip to Domingo Molina. At this point, we figured we had earned a discount from the winery for bringing so may people to the place [and it being our 4^th trip up there]. Domingo Molina was started up in the hills of the Cafayate Valley by the sons of the brothers that started the Domingo winery down in Cafayate that is popular throughout Argentina as a decent cheap wine. The sons named their winery after the surnames of their parents. After their winery was up and going, one of the sons struck out on his own to start a goat cheese farm. Naturally, we went there and walked around petting goats and eating [then buying] copious amounts of cheese.

Bethany and her maps.....

Playing golf up at Domingo Molina.  From Left: AJ, Bethany, Me, Kat, Kev, Em

Bethany getting herself into "rare form"

Mom was so grossed out this cat was at the restaurant.  Too bad!

Getting the low down on all the awesome parts of wine making.

100 year old barrel taps

Derp?

We celebrated a successful day by picking up two 5 liter bottles of wine, the group promising each other that we'd drink them both, on top of the wine we'd already drank that day.  It was a chilly night, so Kev & Emma, Bethany & myself crammed into AJ & Kat's camper with their dog Alex chilling up on the bed.  We spent the night playing Cards Against Humanity and polishing off the first 5L like champs.  Finally, we were all falling asleep while sitting up and decided to cash out for the night.  Bethany and I climbed out of the camper and walked to the front gate, to immediately realize the staff had locked the gate for the night.  Thankfully, the wine had warmed our hearts and minds and we happily climbed the gate / fence, popped over the barbed wire, and went down.  Glad we were wearing jeans and coats to make it over, we then made our hike home.

Things are about to get even more awesome. [background, AMAZING ALFAJORES]

Our first 5 liters are gone. Bummer.....

OH RIGHT WE HAVE 5 MORE!!!!

Day-trip with mom down to Quilmes

Another day, another Sweetcakes issue

Lunch after Quilmes was enough for all of us. 

Partially up the Quilmes ruins.

“Do I need to bring my insurance card?” Mom asked us. “No, I highly doubt they'll take an American insurance card in Argentina.” came Bethany's wry reply. Mom's yearly bout of pleurisy was acting up and she needed some medication. She quickly called her home clinic [using MagicJack; free wifi calls to US phone numbers; love living in the future!] and got the name of the medications. From there, we walked a few blocks over to the pharmacy in Cafayate, went inside, and asked the man working there if they had what she needed. After two minutes of explaining what we needed and what he had, we figured out that the names were close but a little different between Spanish and English. We then forked over the 5 dollars, and left. It was a few minutes later that mom was able to pick her jaw up off the ground.

Eventually our fun times in Cafayate had come to an end, we needed to return to Salta. [despite what Bethany told the reporters] The drive back was going to be fun though: one of the TripAdvisor highlights, and something we hadn't done, was the 'Route of the Bishop', a route through the mountains outside of Salta. Coming from Cayfayate, we had a beautiful drive through the vegetation free desert, climbing a slow grade up through the highlands, reminiscent of southern Bolivia. Eventually, we crested and realized we were eye level with the clouds out on the horizon. Mom, being scared of heights, was doing her best not to freak out too much, particularly when I pulled over to the side of the road. It was great to have an opportunity to do some altitude driving again; I've realized over this trip how beautiful it is to be on mountaintops looking out over a hilly landscape. Maybe that's just the Iowan in me who's unused to it, but it gave me another chance to appreciate all the fantastic views I'd seen on the trip.

Old Route 40

Old Route 40 up towards Salta

Never stop being Awesome Sweetcakes

Looking over the switchbacks of the Route of the Bishop

Taking the Teleferico up over Salta

waterfall at the top of the hill overlooking Salta

one of the churches in Salta

As we sat in the hotel in Salta, Bethany leans back from the computer and says, "Oh, we have an update on Claudia from our friends in Uruguay!"  For those following along, you'll remember our crazy experience with Claudia and her rental.  If you haven't read it, go back to our Uruguay blog and read it now. 

"It's national news here!  They caught Claudia's brother's killer....after he killed his girlfriend when he confessed to her, and after he killed Claudia.....WHAT?!?!?!?!"  The killer eventually confessed to his grandmother, who convinced himself to go to the police and turn himself in.  The man told police Claudia contracted him to kill her brother for several thousand dollars, and then never paid him.  He strangled her in Punta del Este, the city we rented from her in, in a hostel she used to own.  When Claudia was unloading to us at the rental, she said how she had to go complete her brother's death certificate but wasn't sad he was dead because he was "a terrible man, who beat his wife."  So...I'm willing to take the suspects word as true.  Which means, AHHHH THIS IS THE CRAZIEST THING THAT HAPPENED TO US ON OUR TRIP WTFFF?!?!?!

Bethany made the difficult decision to return to America early due to one of her family members becoming ill, so our time in Salta was a bit hectic: Bethany swapped our plane tickets, hers for a few days from then, and mine for a week after hers. The difference: I'd be flying out of Sao Paolo, where we were leaving Sweetcakes. This would be a real trial for me, but I was confident I could make it work. Bethany left from the Salta airport Saturday, and we snapped our 'trip completion' shot with Sweetcakes. The rest of the weekend Mom and I did some light exploration around Salta, and then she was on her long return journey Monday morning. Now it was just me, Sweetcakes, a border crossing, a language I didn't speak, and 2600 kilometers to Sao Paolo. 

We did it!