The overnight sleeper bus infrastructure in Argentina is a world unto itself. This tremendous fleet of double-decker buses run by dozens of companies make traversing the country convenient, comfortable and...fun...enter bus Bingo.
We left Buenos Aires on Tuesday night on a 10h ride west to Mendoza. The ride began with the handing out of bingo cards (for which I needed Lonley Planets numbers quick-guide for the harder ones), followed by the hopnoring of the winners (I think the winner received fruit, but my Spanish is non existant so I may have misunderstood), then we watched the wedding crashers with Spanish subtitles and ate a strange collection of culinary manipulations of meat and potatoes and then reclined the seats into flat beds and watched the stars of the Southern hemisphere. I am not a ´star expert´but I didn´t see any dippers or belts!
In the morning I was awakened by the bus attendant handing me my breakfast try. I pressed the botton to bring my chair upright which catapulted my pillow into the back of the seat in front of me...I was exceedingly amused and felt that set a good tone for the day. After wandering around the center of Mendoza with a mini-backpacks, we found a Spanish-style hotel with a little courtyard with a tiled fountain and goldfish. Then we figured out how to take the local bus from Mendoza to Maipu where we rented bikes and biked about 2mi to a winery for lunch. We parked the bikes and got glasses of wine while our steak sandwiches were grilled 10ft away. Did I mention the weather was perfect? - bright blue skies with the occasional puffy white cloud, 80 deg and low humidity. We continued biking and visiting wineries for another 5 hours and then utterly satisfied made our way back to Mendoza.
After cleaning up we went out for a truely fantastic dinner and then wandered over to the central park where a crowd of several hundred were watching two young, male clowns. Then I was tired and wanted to minimize further blistering before getting to Patagonia, so we headed back to the hotel.
···············Night of rock solid sleep :) ··································
Woke up at 7am for breakfast rolls, jam and tea sitting in the shade of the Spanish-tiled patio with brilliant blue skies above. We waited at the hotel until we were picked up by our guides for paragliding (hehe!)
We drove about 20min and joined 4 other ´´paragliders to be´´ and 6 ´´actual paragliders´´. Then we all piled into a big truck and went up steep, gravely roads, coming hilariously close to the drop offs but nevertheless made it to the top of the hill. I buddied up with a guy who had clearly just eaten chips and a coke for breakfast and when he asked me if this was my first time, he responed ¨me too¨...then we strapped, got some wind in the sail, and ran off the edge (...running off the edge was by far my favorite part!)
We played on the updrafts along the steeps hills for a while before gliding into the valley and doing some sharp cork-skrew dives that left me feeling the tiniest bit queezy. I also enjoed landing for which the instructions are just to run.
This afternoon´s plans include finding gelato and hanging out in the main park and reading.
(I will fill in these blogs with appropriate pictures when I get home :)
Much love to you all. Love, travel cat
1 comment:
Did you notice an unusually high occurance of couples making out in that central park at night? For what seemed like an empty town at night, there were a lot of people in the park. And all of them were making out.
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