Mendoza, Argentina

More than any other city we visited on this journey, Mendoza has been engineered by man. On the face, the two most defining characteristics of Mendoza appear to be completely contrary to one another: (1) 60% of Argentina’s wine comes from here and (2) Mendoza is located in the middle of a desert. One does not realize this, however, upon walking around the city. Though only about 130,000 people (again a tenth the size of the last city we were in…), the city is inundated with parks, plazas, and tree-lined streets. I do not use the word inundated lightly either as this natural beauty would not exist without water. For thousands of years, humans in the region have diverted the waters of the streams and rivers coming down out of the Andes (strongest in the summer snow-melt season) into an elaborate system of irrigation channels that not only line every single city street in Mendoza, but also provide each and every vineyard the life-giving power of water.

Though nature fanatics would be struck by the stunning number of trees and parks that line this city, Mendoza is not a natural city. Though many modern humans would be saddened by the overgrowth of modernization and globalization, at a loss to the simpler, more traditional indigenous way of life, Mendoza has never been a simple traditional region. For thousands of years Mendoza has been engineered by man; historically by darker skinned immigrants from the North and Asia, and only recently by lighter skinned immigrants from Spain and Italy.

Our time in Mendoza was highlighted by two events: wine tasting and outdoor adventure. I will talk first about the later. We spent one morning rafting down the Mendoza River. Though we only spent about one a half hours on the river, we were in for quite a ride with a crazy guide. At one point some of our group tried to form a mutiny and put Seth, an experienced guide in Colorado, at the helm. Our revolt, however, was unsuccessful, though we did manage to survive unscathed despite the wild antics of our guide. Nevertheless, not every boat managed to make it down without incident. On the largest Class IV of the river, one boat absolutely missed (or hit?) the hole and flipped four times! All the other boats went into rescue mode and, since we were in the front, we took off screaming down the river in search of oars and people (fortunately we have experience with hard-paddling thanks to our days in El Chaco). The first item we came upon was a semi-shocked person. We pulled him into our boat and, I kid you not, he did not move or show any sign of awareness for a good ten minutes, which was slightly awkward since he was sitting on Seth who was trying to paddle. We did not have time to check on him because we continued hard downstream in search of oars. We managed to recover six of the seven paddles before relaxing and realizing that our new friend was actually alive.

That afternoon we climbed to the top of some cliffs and rappelled down. Fun!

Enough excitement for one town…The next day we decided to relax and take a bike ride through wine country. We rented some bicycles and spent the entire afternoon riding around from winery to winery. We visited mostly small, family owned vineyards that do not export. The employees at each vineyard were very gracious to us. They offered tours of the vineyards and wine-making facilities. They also offered detailed wine-tasting experiences and taught us how to examine the different aspects and qualities of wines. I really feel like I learned a lot about how wine is made and how doing different things in the production will result in a different kind of wine. The only drawback is that I feel very informed on wine in Spanish, but I am not quite sure how much of this I would be able to translate into English. Nevertheless, this was a very good day spent with very good friends.