Author: marionvermazen

Saturday we drove south to San Juan. Before leaving San José we had breakfast at the same wonderful place as yesterday, Edesia. All the food is top notch but the fresh squeezed orange juice is devine.

Driving south we saw only one or two people in total along the road. The terrain in this area is a lot like Nevada.

We have been seeing red shrines everywhere along the road.

In San Juan are staying at Buena Vista Hotel about ten miles west of the center. The hotel is beautiful and very comfortable.

After checking in we did a winery tour at Bodega Merced del Estero. It is a small family owned winery. The tour was just the four of us. The guides spoke English well. We tasted three wines and learned a lot. The tour was absolutely the highlight of the day.

I won’t be posting any pictures on the blog for a while. I am having troubles with WordPress, my blogging software. The media storage is full and I need to go through and reload many of my pictures from three years ago with a lower resolution. That will take me a lot more time than I usually have when traveling. I’ll come back and add pictures when I have time.

If you would like me to create an Apple and / or Google photo album of our trip let me know.

Breakfast this morning was one of the best breakfasts we have had. We went to a coffee shop called Edesia. The food was fabulous and we shared a pitcher of fresh squeezed orange juice.

Inflation in Argentina is 30% right now.. a lot of restaurants use stickers on the menu for prices because prices change so frequently.

After breakfast we went to the grocery store. We got water and wine and nuts and crackers.

Next we went to a private archaeological museum, everything in the museum was collected in this area by a local engineer between 1960 and 2001. It was quite an amazing museum.

Then we went for a drive east of San José through some beautiful canyons to an old mill.

Today we visited two National Parks. The first which is about 20 miles south of Villa Unión is Talampaya National Park. Even though we had done research ahead of time we were surprised to learn that we would have to take a guided bus tour to enter the park, it would cost us $70 each and the next tour wasn’t until midafternoon. We decided to pass. At the park headquarters we were able to do a short nature walk and we saw two mara’s.

This area has a lot of dinosaur fossils. Duke tried to catch one of the dinosaurs.

We drove farther south to another park entrance. To enter there and do the tour would have cast us $50 each. So again we did the nature trail. We saw a guanaco.

Next we went to Ischigualasto National Park. Since we didn’t want to do the guided 40 mile loop drive we visited the Dr. William Sill museum at the headquarters.

From the park we drove west to San Juan de Jachál, where we will spend Thursday and Friday nights.

We drove a curvy scenic road and then through lots of flat desert to get to San Juan.

This morning we woke up to beautiful clear skies. Our breakfast was delivered to our cabana.

We got a relatively early start. Although Villa Union where we are tonight is directly west of La Rioja we had to go south around the mountains. Our first destination was Chilecita.

Chilecito is the beginning of a 35 km/ 22 mile long cable car that was built to carry ore from the Mejcana mine. The mine was created at 4,600 meters / 15,091 ft near the top of the nearby mountains. The cable car brought the ore from the mine down to Chilecito at an elevation of 1,075 meters / 3,526 ft. We visited the beginning of the cable tour and were given a fantastic tour of the museum. This engineering feat was completed in about 1908!

After visiting the first two stations of the cable car (There were a total of 9 stations.) we went to a nearby spot where a river full of sulfur sediment meets a clear river coming from another part of the mountains. It called the Union of the Rivers ( Unión de Los Rios).

Tonight we are staying in Villa Unión. We have a little Cabaña.

For dinner we went to Restaurante Don Edgardo.

We drove about 300 miles northwest today to the town of La Rioja. it took us about six hours. The beginning of the drive was through farming country but eventually that changed to desert.

Along the way did get stopped by the police because we didn’t have our headlights on. There is a bit of a story which I will tell after we leave Argentina. Everything turned out fine.

In La Rioja we are staying at Casa Adela – Cabanas Resort. We have one Cabana with two bedrooms. It is perfect.

We had dinner at a restaurant called Zoita just around the corner from where we are staying. They eat dinner very late in Argentina. The restaurant didn’t even open until nine.