I was definitely
lying yesterday when I said I got up early, because today, at the
dark and gloomy hour of 4:45, we woke up and headed out to a border
crossing high in the mountains into Argentina. With a beautiful
breakfast of microwaveable hamburgers from a gas station, I was ready
to sleep through most of the drive. Although, I do have to say that
this crossing was one of the most beautiful I've ever been to,
instead of sleeping I spent the better part of two hours taking
pictures of the mountains. To get to the crossing you have to climb
the side of one of the mountains, (my Gramps drives a Chevrolet Spark
by the way) so were riding along in our little car sandwiched between
18 wheelers going through 30 switchbacks and like 6 tunnels to get to
the Chilean side of the border crossing. By this point its just a
three lane road, one to Argentina, two to Chile, that's how small the
border crossing is. We get waved through and continue and on the way
to the Argentine side, we see a line of cars 3 km long pretty much
parked, people are walking around talking to the other cars, we heard
later that the wait to get into Chile if you were at the end of the
line was about 8 hours, ouch.
Luckily we didn't
have to wait at all on the Argentine side, because we missed the
booths on the first pass, yep, they aren't in the middle of the road
like a U.S.-Canada border, you have to veer left, through the
oncoming lane to some building like 200 meters off to the side of the
road. It was quite poorly designed so we just drove on by the first
time. We kept going for about 3 minutes, and once we saw no more
signs for anything to do with immigration we pulled over at a hotel
to ask what was up. Apparently we passed up a few minutes up the
road, so we go back spot it and we do an illegal U-turn into the
customs area. Canadians have to pay a fee to enter the country, so
I'm ready, with Argentine pesos, American dollars whatever they need.
Turns out, I was supposed to do it online and pay by credit card,
print a receipt and hand it to them. Since I didn't have it, they let
me fill out the form online on one of their computers at the back of
the building, which was super nice. So with that we were headed off
to my uncle's house.
My uncle bought a
massive lot 4 hectare lot with five buildings, some pools, two water
towers and a radio dish on the lot for about 35'000 USD. It used to
be a cannery, but the owner went out of business and the buildings
became derelict. The main house is quite beautiful though and my
uncle is fixing up the other buildings.
My uncle and his
girlfriend had a baby quite recently at this house in Argentina, so
even though they are both Canadian the baby boy is Argentinean. We
arrived safely and after settled in and met my new baby cousin I went
for a nap in one of their hammocks. The recommended that I have a
small sleep because we were invited to an Argentinean barbecue dinner
later. The thing is it starts late, we left our house at 7:00, the
meat started cooking at 8:30 and we finished eating at 11:00. The
food was amazing, sadly I forgot my phone and camera, I still snapped
a picture of the food on my uncles phone, but I missed a great
opportunity. I had a lot of firsts today, first time trying mate
(that I can remember), first time trying blood sausage, first time
trying something called “sweetbread”, which is the thyroid of a
cow. That last one was quite weird in texture, the rest of it though
was delicious. We went home and I promptly went into a food coma and
slept.
Today's musical feature is another performance by "Pierogi", this time playing "Ma'Land".
No comments:
Post a Comment