Mountains!

I'm in Mendoza, Argentina's wine capital, for the next 24ish hours, staying in a hostel.

We went to see the tallest mountain in the world yesterday. From the beginning, though...

On Monday evening we left BsAs on an overnight bus. They fed us some sort of icky meat and we played bingo and watched "Signs"--that random movie about aliens and crop circles. Argentina between Buenos Aires and Mendoza looks about like western Kansas: flat and dry and not many people. We got into Mendoza at 8:30 AM and it's a bit like driving into the Rockies: it's flat for ever and then all of a sudden there's mountains.

From Mendoza it's a 4-hour bus ride up to Puente del Inca, which is a little (maybe 20 people live there) town by this weird-looking natural bridge that was created by these sulfur springs. There's a ruin of these fancy baths some rich guy built, but the springs have deposited all this stuff on them, so they look like they're molding. It's weird.

We were going to hike into the Aconcagua National Park and camp for a night, but they were going to make us pay $20 EACH to do that, so we day hiked in. Aconcagua is the tallest mountain in South America at 6900 something meters (23000 feet or so). The town we were in was at 2700 m. And the mountains there are unbelievably gorgeous. All the way up to Puente del Inca we kept watching mountains like the geologist wannabes we are. But it's wild, the rocks keep changing and keep changing. There's places that look like Utah next to places that look like the Sierras next to places that look like places in Southern California. It's totally gorgeous. We walked from the town to the park on these old railroad tracks and a dog from town followed us all the way in and then ran off. I don't get it. But we walked in to these lakes and we could see Aconcagua and all this other gorgeous stuff. Don't worry, we took pictures. Maybe sometime you'll all see them. And next time I'm at Caltech I'm going to have to look up the geolgy of the Andes, cuz it seems like it'd be really cool.

Oh, and believe it or not, I got into a discussion about politics with an economist from Switzerland. AND it wasn't my fault. He brought up how interesting it would be to do a Master's thesis on Argentina's economy, and then off we went into the IMF and free trade and agricultural subsidies and so forth. I don't understand why this always happens to me. I get into perfectly reasonable discussions with people and it turns into this hilarious argument. And it honestly wasn't my fault this time. I didn't bring up anything related to politics. If you don't believe me, ask Becky.

Anyway, so today we came back to Mendoza, but we couldn't get bus tickets until tomorrow evening, so we're going to stay in a random hostel tonight and see what we can see tomorrow.