My name is Marion Vermazen. I am a traveler, hiker, reader, Sun alumnus, computer geek, YouTuber, Spanish and French language student, knitter, weaver and genealogist.
Today we drove south to Mendoza in the heart of Argentina’s well known Mendoza wine region.
After checking in to our hotel we went out exploring. Our hotel, Portal Plaza Suites is on one of Mendoza five main plazas, Plaza Chile. The main plaza is Plaza Independencia. The four other plaza are at the four corners of an imaginary square two blocks out from the main square.
We walked to Restaurante Carolina Cocina on Plaza Italia for dinner and had a great meal.
We are staying at Hotel Buena Vista outside of San Juan. While we were eating breakfast this morning I saw a beautiful bird and managed to get a good picture. It’s a Great Kiskadee!
After breakfast we drove to Ullum Dam and did a hike. We were planning to hike to some caves along the shore of the lake. But after hiking up for about half a mile we decided that the trail was too steep so we turned around.
Next we drove into San Juan and visited the cathedral. Then we had coffee and alfajores at a coffee shop nearby.
A few blocks away we visited the house where Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was born. It is now a museum. The guy who told us about Saramiento educated us about Sarmiento and his many accomplishments since we knew nothing about him. He lived in the 1800’s. He was a president of Argentina, an ambassador to the U.S. and an educator and he did an amazing amount of things for his country.
We drove back to the hotel, played cards and then later had dinner at a nearby restaurant, La Coquette.
Tomorrow we will drive to Mendoza.
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.
Update: January 2026 – I have now added pictures to the posts that didn’t have them.
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.
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