Andes Mountains

We booked another tour during our stay in Mendoza through Say Hueque travel agency.  I wouldn't recommend them, and I will talk about that more in a later blog.  We ended up having a great time taking pictures of all the beautiful scenery.

Our first stop was at the dam, the city of Mendoza utilizes a lot of the melted snow from the Andes Mountains.  It collects in the dam pictured below and then is distributed to the various canals.

As we drove to our next stop we had some pretty great views from the windows of the bus.  The bus was a bit uncomfortable, but the tour guide Claudia from Huentata was fantastic.  She was bilingual and explained everything in fantastic detail.  It made the full day tour fly by.

View from the bus window.

Our next stop was at this historic bridge above.  To be completely honest the tour started at 7:30 a.m. and I think I dozed off a bit in the explanation so suffice it to say that it is an old bridge and was pretty cool.  While we were at this sight we also were able to watch two condors fly around one of the mountains for about 10 minutes.

To give you perspective, if you enlarge this picture you should be able to see the houses in the bottom left-hand corner of this photograph.

At this stop we got to watch one of the boys that was on our trip experience snow for the first time.  He was pretty energetic and him and I became friends throughout the day.  In the back and to the right in the photograph above you can see Mount Aconcagua.  Also during this stop Jason was able to get the tour guide to talk about the rugby team who crash landed in the Andes and resorted to cannibalism.  She said we weren't too far from the sight of the crash and that one of the members of the team still makes a trek each year to the spot of the crash.

We then made a quick stop at this Incan bridge.  This is a natural made bridge and apparently a hotel decided to develop on this land.   Not pictured above is the huge mountain that stands behind this bridge and then what used to be the hotel.  Some years ago there was a massive avalanche and hotel was destroyed and 7 people were killed.  After another avalanche in 2005 it was completely fenced off and trespassing is discouraged.

We had a very late lunch and then had to make a stop so some people could return some of their rented snow equipment and then headed back to the city as night began to fall.  I got this last picture on our way out...

Ciao,

Tim