Some highlights from Argentina
We only had 9 days to experience some of the Argentinian culture and nature so we had to take some shortcuts and decide what we wanted to experience the most. Our choice fell upon travelling across the pampas and visit Mendoza, the famous vine area nearby the Andes mountains and the Chilean border. We were up for some serious kilometres driving by car across the country from Buenos Aires to Mendoza!!! As the language was Spanish and we had heard that not many people spoke English, we looked forward to overcoming some nice challenges…
After arriving Buenos Aires in the morning, picking up the luggage and the rental car, we headed towards Rosario where our football hero Messi spent his first years before moving to Barcelona in Spain. The roads were nice and straight so the trip went fast and easy. We called it the day after eating walking in the streets of Rosario, eating dinner and checking out where we should go the next morning to visit Messi’s home and football fields nearby. The next morning, we noticed that someone had driven into our parked rental car just outside the hotel and left. Luckily, we had a full insurance on our rental contract, so we did not have to pay for the unlucky event… 😊
After a nice breakfast we went to visit Messi’s home area and we found his exact house and football fields! We were all a bit excited to see how it looked like and we were not surprised to find around 20 of them close to where he lived. No wonder he fell into the habit of playing football… 😊
We continued our journey towards Cordoba on the way to Mendoza and had another day on the road. Luna Noor was a bit bored, but found out that she could read the books of Harry Potter in English while we drove as the road was nearly one straight line all the way from Rosario to Cordoba. When we approached Cordoba, we were stopped by the police who told us that the road we had chosen to go to the city centre was not safe and that we should turn and take another road. What a nice experience! We arrived Cordoba by a nice bridge and parked the car outside the hotel. That night we ate dinner in a Lebanese restaurant nearby our hotel and went straight to bed after that. Driving for many hours each day is serious business – we got incredibly tired!!! The next day we went up early, ate a quick breakfast and went for a small sightseeing inside town. We got to see a beautiful church, a park, a walking street and some nice old buildings and architecture.
On the road again, we aimed for San Luis for rest the following night. We passed a small town just outside Cordoba where Che Guevara grew up. We got to see the house and his hometown, a quiet little place with a nice centre and park.
When we arrived San Luis that afternoon, it started to rain… And it continued to rain the next day filling the streets with small rivers of water. We only got to eat, sleep and walk a small trip to see the city centre which was quite cosy. This town called itself the technology capital of Argentina. The infrastructure was quite nice as they had made cycle roads next to the main roads all over town.
Our next stop was now Mendoza where vines, grapes, nature, olive trees, horses and vine waited us. We had a great time horseback riding in between the vines and olive trees, strolling along some dry areas of the Mendoza river, visiting a winery, buying vine, experiencing a great Argentinian barbecue after finishing our horseback riding tour.
On our way back to Mendoza, we were supposed to stay over one night in Junin to shorten down our driving hours. Instead, because of heavy rain we had to drive all the way back to Buenos Aires as the road to Junin was flooded. We arrived in the night after a 12 hours drive, lucky to get straight to bed in our rented hotel room. Buenos Aires turned out to be a nice city with many cafés, small shops, street art, nice hotels, churches, parks, buildings, city zoo, monuments and the most impressing graveyard where Eva Peron is buried.
We had a very nice stay and hope to be back some day to see more of the country.
Worldwide Family Tour 