Mendoza – January 27th, 2015
Jan 30th, 2015 by rallyadmin
The road doesn’t change much here. It’s a high plains desert. The same scrub we’ve been driving through for a few days now. The only real difference is the amount of traffic though what few cars we do see aren’t very many. As we head farther north, there are more people and there are more vacation destinations here than farther south. And there aren’t any more roads.
The saving grace is that the road is very fast. Most of the trucks are moving far in excess of the maximum 80/90 kph speed limit. And there aren’t any police, at least none that seem to care, so we are moving tight along.
The area is one of Argentina’s main oil producing areas. It’s not western Texas but there are the occasional oil-well pumps and the usual holding tanks. There must be more than we can see from the road if the Toyota Hilux trucks that belong to companies working in the area. They probably make up a lot of the traffic that we are seeing. And they drive like workers that are on the clock – just a couple of kph’s below the official speed limit. No need to rush.
It’s also getting quite a bit warmer. In the south, we had been driving in rather cool weather, in the 50’s. Now that we’ve driven to the north again, we’re back in the 80’s and pushing 90. It’s odd to even write that the temperatures are going up as we drive north(!). Of course, this is the southern hemisphere where south is toward the cold Antarctic pole and north is toward the equator.
As we approach San Rafael, the terrain changes yet again. There vegetation turns green and there are trees! Yes, real, upright, tall trees. We are now in the eastern foot hills of the Andes and there is water here though not much rain a this time of the year.
San Rafael is a center of the Argentine wine industry and we are driving through acres of vineyards. The harvest season isn’t for a few months but the vine are in full leaf and, if you look closely, you can see the bunches of grapes. Much of the grapes that are grown here are shipped to Mendoza which is the center of wine making in northwest Argentina.
As we get closer to Mendoza, the traffic thickens up and we’re looking for a hotel. John jokes that we should see if there’s an Ibis hotel here in Mendoza. We’ve stayed in a number of Ibis hotels around the world, from Formula 1 (now Ibis Budget) to relatively classy Ibis. We check the GPS to see if it knows of a Mendoza Ibis. It does! We plug it in as the new destination and arrive in a few minutes.
We’re getting close to the end of this trip. Tomorrow we’re doing a wine tour. Tonight, we’re done for the day.
Obi-wan