Córdoba, Ché, Mendoza and who´s black bookbag is this?

It´s been a busy few days of mostly fun. I will try to recount the highlights in a stream of consciousness to share the details.

We travelled from Iguazu to Córdoba, which was 20 hours on a bus. We did not have a lot of time there. It is a very large city and tough to really get a feel for. There are 8 Universities in the city, resulting in a hip young crowd roaming the streets. Lots of nightlife, businesses, rather expensive hostels, etc. (Hostel story: we walked into the shared room and there was a guy with no shirt on who had wrapped his left arm, part of his body, and part of his neck in an electrical cord. I have no earthly idea what he was doing, but it did not help me to sleep well)

Córdoba is very close to a smaller town that we spent a day in called Alta Gracia. Very quaint little town in the Andes. This is also the main home where Ernesto Ché Guevara grew up. In his former home there is now a museum marking various stages of his life. It was a really well done museum and very interesting to see how someone goes from being an asthmatic young child to a world famous revolutionary/philosopher.

There is also a Jesuit mission turned museum here. Very interesting piece of history. The Jesuits were some innovative people with some advanced technology. I didn´t leave the museum with positive feelings toward the Jesuits missions in LAtin America, but it was very interesting to see the advanced technologies from the 17th century.

We took an overnight bus to Mendoza. The heater was broken on the bus and was constantly on, making it difficult to sleep, but these are super nice busses and quite comfortable despite occassional annoyances. When the sun came up we could see the snow capped Andes mountains on the horizon, beautiful!

Mendoza is a much smaller town. We are camping about 6km outside of town. At the campgrounds we have run into a Brit who is finishing school in Anthropology and just doing osme travelling and some Canadians who have travelled from Western Canada to Mendoza on motorcycles and plan to return via the same mode of transportation.

We are camping in a much smaller little town that has a church, an abandoned amusement park, a giant slide and a drive in theater. I went to test out the giant slide yesterday. It is about 50-60 feet tall and is metal. They give you a cut up piece of carpet for about 1 dollar and you can have unlimited rides. To give a good picture, there were about 100 people at the slide, all of which were Argentine. There were about 60 people riding the slide, 90% of which were ages 5-15. Then along comes big ol gringo. I went down a few times, but finally caught enough air over the last hump to bang my ankle up and decided I had had enough. Tracy says she will give it a try with me today.

This morning we sat down for lunch (we thought it was noon, but really it was 11. Apparently we have spent the last 2 or three days an hour ahead of everyone else and did not realize it because they are different than Buenos Aires here in Mendoza, crazy.) A lady kept asking us weird questions about how to order, which seemed odd, but we told her what we knew and explained that we were not sure about anything and she should go inside and ask. She did so and came back out and sat down beside us again. She again tried to strike up a conversation about ordering and then left. A few minutes later I looked down and realized that where my bookbag had been, there was now a black bookbag that was empty. We fell for the oldest trick in the book. I am an idiot for setting bookbag down beside me instead of in my lap, but we werent in a crowd and did not really see it coming. They got our camera (you see now why you have not gotten to see the slide or the snow capped Andes?), our extra camera pieces, our guide book, sun screen, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, flashlight, water bottle and one of my pocket knives. I was quite angry with the lady and her accomplice as well as with myself. We cant go back and fix it now, so we are trying to look at the bright side of things. We made a police report and there were two Belgian girls there who had lost passports, debit cards and most everything else in a similar incident, so I guess we should be thankful to have learned a lesson without more serious consequences. We did bring another camera with us, so hopefully we can switch over and this one will last more than 6 weeks. The police were very hospitable to us, the restaurant owner was also very kind and was visibly angry that this happened to us, which we appreciated.

We were pretty disappointed with our guidebook anyways, though it was certainly better than the nothing we were left with. While walking around looking for the various little things we needed to replace at pharmacies and whatnot, I noticed an agency that did trout fishing tours, and was curious. As I expected, the trout fishing was very expensive, but I mentioned to the guy that we had lost our guidebook and asked if he knew where we could find another one (books in English are hard to come by in smaller cities). As it turns out he is an author of the Argnentina and Bolivia Frommer´s Guidebook and had been sent a stack of Frommer´s South America and had been trying to figure out what to do with them. Nice as he was, he sent us on our way with a free guide book (cover price $30 USD).

We plan to fninsh tonight out with some vegetarian or middle eastern food (ENOUGH MEAT ALREADY) as Mendoza has a nice array of restaurants to give us a small break until we reach our next farm. We also plan to scope out a bar or other late night establishment to try to set up camp tomorrow and see if there is any buzz around the US elections. Should be fun times. Wednesday we head to Bariloche for the last leg of this travel jaunt until we head to the farm on Monday.