Puente del Inca sits atop the Andes right next to the mammoth Aconcagua. We arrived to this little mountain town on thursday afternoon. The bus ride was longer than expected because of a fatal car accident that blocked the road for over an hour. We arrived into Puente del Inca (about 9000 feet elevation) and found a refugio to stay in which was one of only like 10 buildings in the entire town. The refugio sat directly next to a natural land bridge crossing a river with an Incan site built into it…increible. The refugio was basically empty the first night because it is the end of the climbing season there. Only two other people stayed in the refugio and Julian (the guy who ran the place) treated all of us to free pizza the first night. Throughout our visit to this small town, we of course kept flirting with the idea of attempting to summit. Aconcagua is one of those mountains that I have read and have known about for quite some time. It is on my dream list of mountains to climb and here we were, sitting right at the base of it. It was especially tempting because the mountain is actually doable for anybody in decent shape because the main route is basically a walk up. The toughest part about the climb is the altitude. Seven climbers have died this season on the mountain and four of them died of altitude sickness from poor acclimitization. Another one died by falling in a crevase while attempting to climb a more difficult route, another died by falling off something, and another died by having a heart attack on the top. Apparently that guy got to the top, sat down, and had a heart attack right there. Anyway, I have no idea why I am talking about fatalities but I think the point was, we were really tempted by this giant mountain but sanity won the day. I think we finally decided for sure not to climb it when Julian was telling us how cold it got up there this time of year…although we still ran into a few attempting it. Julian lives near Buenos Aires but in the climbing season runs the refugio and spends time climbing the various mountains nearby. He is also a guide and holds time records for peaks in the area and has climbed Aconcagua numerous times. I thought I heard him say he has climbed Aconcagua 100 times but I think I misunderstood him since it takes about 2 weeks to summit. On Friday we went scrambling up a peak in the area and at the top (about 12000 feet) we had a beautiful view of Aconcagua. Since a lot of the climb was loose scree, we got to basically run/ski down for a portion of the descent…fun times. On the last part of our leg down I chased a wild horse down the mountain…in the heat of the chase I got to the bottom in no time and realized that Adam was still way up on the mountain…so I let the horse get away…or else you all know that I would have caught that horse…ok, maybe not. Anyway, today we caught a bus back down to Mendoza and are waiting around for a night bus to Cordoba. I hope everyone is doing well…love to all of course!
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Quick Update
Hi all! Don’t have much time so this’ll be short. We made our way to Santiago and arrived at hostel run by a cool American guy. The selling point was that he had a washing machine that we could do clothes in for free AND a DVD player with over 700 movies. We didn’t spend all our time there, but it was good times. We did go out and explore Santiago and decided we like it much better than Buenos Aires in terms of big cities. It is really smoggy unfortunately, but the sites and architecture and fountains are just so beautiful. You can check out our Chile pictures to see what it was like.
Now we’re in Mendoza, Argentina. This city is really high up in the mountains and is near Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the western hemosphere topping off at just under 7000 meters high or 22,841 feet. We can’t wait to go see it. Mostly we wandered around the city seeing the sites. They have this gorgeous park that’s almost as big as the city itself where people jog, play soccer, row around a lake, and even walk through a large zoo. We just took the one hour tour since the place was so huge. Then we went and hung out with this cool guy we met named Ray (who just happens to have the same birthday as me 
and had all you could eat pizza for just 8 pesos (less than $3). Awesome find. We’re not quite sure where we go from here but it will be towards the east. Hope everything is well back home!
In the shadow of the volcano
After spending a couple days in Valdivia we hopped on a bus for a quick three hour ride to Pucon in Chile. Our guidebook warns that this place can be rather touristy and to beware of inflated prices, but it is a worthwhile visit as the town is slated as the adventure capital of Chile. It’s not hard to see why as you can just about every extreme outdoor activity there is here. Hiking, mountainbiking, whitewater rafting, canopy, skiing, horseback riding, and you can even climb the beautiful and imposing Volcan Villarrica, the primary reason many people come to this place. Unfortunately, everything costs money and a lot of money at that. To go rafting on a class IV river would have cost about $36 a person and to do the volcano summit would have been at least $50. Some people paid as much as $70. Seeing as how we’d felt like we’d been spending way too much lately, we decided to hold back and find the cheapest form of entertainment we could for our short stay here. We arrived in the late afternoon and this older woman named Sylvia came right up to us and offered us to stay at her place. She seemed nice enough and it was a decent deal so we went with it. We didn’t do much the first night except explore the town and eat an expensive, but very good, pizza. The next day we figured we’d try hiking or something.
We actually didn’t leave town the next day as something occurred that we hadn’t been expecting. It turns out that Chile was in an election year and the former president: socialist Ricardo Lagos who had held office since the year 2000 was now stepping down. From what we gathered by listening to our host Sylvia he was a fairly successful president. He helped Chile’s economy grow tremendously and had an approval rating of 75% when he left office. The next president elect has a very interesting story, first of all because it was a woman. Not only that Michelle Bachelet is the very first woman president the country of Chile has ever elected, and she’s had a very impressive history even before that. It wasn’t too long ago that Chile was under control of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990. During his reign he killed and tortured thousands of people. Bachelet herself was imprisoned and tortured before being exiled to England and Australia in 1975. Since then she has worked as pediatrician, raised three children pretty much on her own, and was appointed Chile’s first female defense minister along with being health minister.
I had no idea of any of this, but it was still impressive to watch on TV all the people gathering and celebrating in the streets of Santiago and Valparaiso as their new president made her way to what I assume was the senate to take her oath of office. I have never seen so many people this passionate about politics before. I had no clue as to the backstory behind all this at that point, but to see these people come together and actually CELEBRATE the election of a new president was inspiring to me. Maybe I’ve been living in the wrong areas, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen people care that much about an election, even if they did vote for the guy who won. So we watched Bachelet take her oath and then sing the national anthom. After this we felt we’d spent enough time in front of the TV and went out to look around and do things. It turns out people were celebrating here in this little town as well. A whole section of the main street was blocked off and various performers were singing and playing music in honor of their new leader. People were dancing, clapping, and we sat back and watched the festivities in awe. If politics were like this in America maybe people would actually care.
Later that night we went to the huge hotel casino near the water (I’m not kidding) and went and saw the movie “The Constant Gardner”. A very well-done, realistic, and unfortunately depressing movie about the state of things in Africa. I would recommend seeing it but won’t go into much detail here so I won’t spoil it for you. We also spent some time with a couple from North Carolina who were also staying at our place. We exchanged traveling stories and had a few good laughs. The next day we hitchiked to the nearbye national park to go hiking for the day. We went through a few forest and over some lava fields and even halfway up the volcano itself to where the ski lifts begin. We were then lucky enough to catch a ride down to town from people who had just finished hiking the volcano. No we need to shower and get ready for a nice long night bus ride to Santiago where we will spend the next few days, hoping to meet up with some people we met in Cochrane. Peace.
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