we decided to take the chance and rent a car for the week from Mendoza. the main purpose of the car was so we could easily access the climbing area los arenales, 140 km southwest of mendoza. without a car we could only get there on weekends and it would involve a 12 km hike up a dirt road from the town manzano historico unless we could find someone to drive us up.
from bariloche we took an overnight bus to mendoza and got the car. by pure random coincidence we ran into marc, a Canadian we'd met at cochamo, on the street in mendoza. crazy.
we spent a total of 5 days at arenales. weather wasn't great, lots of low clouds, some wind but also some nice sunny days. we got in 4 good days of climbing. unfortunately we were limited again by our small rack and only one rope, so stuck mainy with sport climbs. did a couple bolted trad- like climbs, samarkanda and andante con dulfer which were really good. did a number of sport climbs including el condor pasa, a fun 5-pitch sport climb and we did see a condor while climbing. wedidnt get to do any of the longer trad climbs and nice cracks due to our limited gear. not very many people there. the book had some wrong and conflicting info about route lengths and grades which got us in trouble once on a rappel. still it was a fun few days in a nice location and it feels good to be sore from climbing again.
in the middle of our arenales trip we went up to mendoza to meet up with don and martha. had a good dinner and next day went down to maipu for some wine tasting. they did the bike thing and we visited on winery with the car then went into the andes towards the Chilean border. had a good view of aconcagua, highest mountain in south america at 22,830 feet. decided we didn't want to pay to dayhike there and camped in uspallata, where "seven years in tibet" was filmed. headed down to arenales again with a stop in el salto to do a little sport climbing on volcanic rock. place was like an outdoor gym.
only little incident we had is we lost a little piece of the bumper, we have no idea how. maybe someone previously did that and glued it back and on the dirt road it fell off. we'll see how much that costs us.
less than a week left in argentina/ south america. we'll next head to cordoba tomorrow night and check out capilla del monte and hopefully climb, then buenos aires then onto cook islands after a 10 hour layover at LAX.
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