More beauty queens and bowling!

So, it`s been a little while so I thought I would take a few and catch everyone up. We enjoyed last weekend while walking around Mendoza and hanging out at the hostel`s pool….quite relaxing, I might say! Then, on Sunday night, Steve`s friend from college, Byron, who has been in the Paraguayan Peace Corps for the past 1 1/2 years, showed up with his sister, Chelsea, and his other friend from Paraguay, Vanessa–our new travel companions for the next two weeks. The five of us spent Monday going around to all the nearby wineries, checking out the wine, drinking a lot of it, and of course, buying a lot of it. Quite a few of them were very beautiful, and the wine was excellent….I`ll have to remember to buy a few bottles when I get back to the States!

The five of us then rented a car and headed up to the Chilean-Argentine border to do some hiking and get a good look at the mountains, and more specifically, Aconcagua. It is the biggest mountain outside of the Himalayas, and at almost 7000 meters, it is pretty much a beast. Anyway, we drove up to a town called Upsullata which is where they filmed a lot of scenes from the Brad Pitt movie, Seven Years in Tibet, and this is where I spent my 24th birthday.
Wahoo! In celebration, the five of us went on a two hour horseback riding excursion through some really nice scenery–we were along this ridgeline for awhile, with desert to our left and this beautiful, green oasis-type valley to the right. The guides even got all of our horses to gallop, which I had never done before, so I was having a great time, running around on my horse. I`ll have to stick some pictures up later.

Anyway, after Upsullata, we drove up to a tiny town called Las Cuevas, located about 10 km. from the Chilean border. The town acts as kind of a base for people who come to climb Aconcagua, but we just did a small hike up to see the mountain, and then did another day hike to check out this glacier. It was nice to finally get out and stretch the legs, and it felt really good to be active again! We also checked out Puente del Inca, this natural bridge that is in this hot spring area. Because of all the sulfur, the bridge and all the rock around it are yellow and orange and very striking.

After the mountain experience, Byron, Steve, Chelsea, and myself headed back to Mendoza, and Vanessa stayed to spend one more night and day in Las Cuevas. La Festival de Vendimia really got going last night, and of course, we had to check it out, so we did a little shopping, and then made our way out to the street to check out the parade. As many of you read last time I wrote, there was a beauty pageant here last weekend that Steve and I saw. Well, turns out the winner of that is the winner of the “Central Mendoza” region, but she then has to compete against the 10 or 15 other winners from other regions around northern Argentina. The winner is actually announced tonight in the culmination ceremony in the park, but the parade last night was to pull them through the city on floats so everyone could take a look at the girls. It is insane. They say that this whole festival is about the wine harvest and celebration of that, but in reality, the whole Vendimia festival is to celebrate these beauty queens. There pictures are hanging in every store window, and they have big old headshots plastered on bus stops and billboard things all over town. Not only that, but the ENTIRE city turned out for this parade, just to watch the pretty 20-somethings float by. It was great. To honor the supposed-harvest theme of this festival, the beauty queens were chucking little fruits out of the floats to people…..little grapes, the occasional flying apple, and at the very end, WATERMELONS! Honestly, they were chucking smaller watermelons out of the float, into the thousands of people standing around. Can you imagine getting clocked by a watermelon? I saw an apple come flying into the table in front of me when no one was looking, and that thing looked like a projectile missile, let alone a flipping watermelon. It was crazy!

So yeah, we checked out the parade and of course, picked our favorites to win the pageant tonight, and then we happened to stumble upon a bowling alley. Let me tell you–bowling down here is definitely different than back home! They play duckpin bowling, which are these little pins instead of big ones, but you also get balls that are like the size of a grapefruit, and you get three rolls. These, however, are not the reason it was so funny. EVERYTHING in the bowling alley is manual down here, and I don`t just mean the the score keeping. They have men than stand down at the end of the lane, waiting behind a vinyl backdrop, and these men are the ones that clear your fallen pins away, as well as reset them when your turn is over. It was the strangest thing–you would finish your turn, and while waiting for your next one, you would see these little feet down at the end of the lane, kinda moving around, and then you would see hands appear from somewhere to set the pins back up. You can`t see their faces, so they are entirely unknown, but the little feet and hands moving around were great. They also manually chuck the bowling balls back up the lane, but they have to do it with enough force that they will make it up the hump and back into your waiting hands. It was hysterical! (I`d also like to mention to everyone reading this, or mainly, anyone who has ever gone bowling with me before and knows that I am awful: I WON THE GAME! It was spectacular, and I even beat Steve….only by one pin, but still counts in my book!)

So yeah, today is the last day of the festival. I think we are planning to partake in the festival by buying plenty of wine, and then trekking up to the top of this hill to watch the festival in the theater–tickets are sold out, so this is the best we can do. We`ll check out the fireworks, see the new beauty queen, drink some wine….sounds wonderful! We bought tickets for tomorrow night to head to Buenos Aires, so that is the plan now…..hasta luego!