Puente del Inca

Lou: We took a 4 hr. bus ride up the mountains this weekend to Puente del Inca. It is a small village whose main attraction is a natural arch that has formed over a river because of the minerals and natural springs coming out of the rock. The signs said that the minerals were calcium carbonate & iron oxide. You can see the orange color in the photos. There was once a classy hotel with mineral springs in the rooms (beginning of 1900’s), but a earthquake/ landslide destroyed it. It was mostly up above, but you can see the remains of some of it on the side of the cliff, too. The story goes that all of the people from the hotel were in the church when the avalanche came, and everyone survived. You can still see the little stone church up above.

We decided to stay in town for the night and to spend the day making the 2 mile trek to the entrance of Aconcagua park to see a good view of the mountain (tallest point in the americas) and to hang out a bit. We checked into a cheap hostel and the guy told us that he gave tours that went out there and other places. We decided to take him up on it instead of all of the walking.

The tour started out going to the small cemetary that has memorials for people that have died trying to climb Aconcagua. Its probably a good thing that it is situated a little ways from town, since most of the business there is outfitting and leading people to go up the mountain!

Next we headed for a view of the Old Man (Aconcagua). That’s it in the background of the photo of us with the sign. In the picture it is still 40 km. away from us. It was starting to cloud over a little because it rained that evening (snowed on the mountain peaks). It was nice to see grass and ponds in this valley as opposed to the rocky mountain landscape.

Then David drove us up a narrow, very windy road (no such thing as guard rails) to the Cristo Redentor. If you look real closely in the picture of Dan you can see a statue below. (in case you don’t know, you can click on a picture in order to see a bigger version of it) It is on the border of Chile & Argentina and was once the way to travel from one to the other. Now, there is a very long tunnel through the mountain. It was so cold and windy! We climbed up the hill that you can see Dan standing on. Down below is where the car was parked; way, way down below (no picture of it) is where the main road was. I got a picture of the glaciers on the mountain tops from up here.

On our way back we stopped by the river at an old train station. There have been no trains running in Argentina for 30 years. A lot of the building was trashed or stolen and we walked along the river bed for a little while.

We headed back to the hostel for a chilly evening. It was an old train station and in back there was a bar that was once a building in which they changeed cars by using a big round piece of flooring with tracks that rotates. It happened that we were the only ones staying that night. We made some soup and watched a DVD. Funny that we had DVD player with sound system, but no heat. We bundled up like good little Minnesotans, though, and it was ok.