Buses, airplanes, ham, cheese, and wine

Yeah yeah I know it’s been a week and we haven’t written anything. I can’t even remember where to start. It’s been travel madness. To start I’ll just give you a summary of what the past week has been. We’ve taken a taxi from San Juan del Sur to Rivas and barely caught our bus in time for San Jose, Costa Rica. We got off the bus in Alajuela, Costa Rica (near San Jose airport) and took a taxi to our hotel there. We stayed there two nights there, and then caught a very early flight to Buenos Aires through Panama City. We took a cab from the airport to our hostel in Buenos Aires. A few days later we took an overnight bus to Mendoza, Argentina and that’s where we are now. Phew!


Nothing extremely exciting has happened except that yesterday was really fun. I will write about that later, though. First I’ll start with our trip from San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua down to San Jose, Costa Rica. In our standard style we slept as late as possible before catching the cab to Rivas. We had to do this because the bus to San Jose stopped there and not in San Juan del Sur. Our bus was supposed to be there around 9am and we left San Juan around 8:15 after running down the street with our bags. The cab tried to stop and pick up another person on the way and half out of fear of robbery and half in urgency we started yelling at him “No tiempo! No tiempo!” He kept going and we got to the bus stop half confused on where to go. We walked toward some other tourist looking people as the bus rolled up. Talk about good timing.

Our bus was nice. TicaBus is a Central American bus company that travels from Mexico to Panama and they are surprisingly clean, comfortable AND on time which is a rarity. Well they are on time when they can be. We got stuck at the border for 3 hours. It was Sunday and the lines were massive, especially the way they have it set up. You have to get an exit stamp from Nicaragua and pay a couple bucks, then board the bus go about 100 yards through the border to Costa Rica and go through the whole process again.

Only Costa Rica is much stricter because they don’t like Nicaraguans and really watch for illegal immigrants. They also searched our bags so that took another half hour or so. It was a really slow process, but this time it was much better because it was nice weather, we had direction from the bus operators, and we were not alone. I even changed my leftover cordobas for some Costa Rican colones with one of the crazy cambio guys. The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful except they showed “The Bodyguard” in Spanish. Haha

We got off the bus at the airport in Alajuela since we heard it was a little nicer and we already knew San Jose sucked. Plus it’s close to the airport and our flight was at 6am. Since the flight was so early we didn’t want to risk not making it due to some unknown delay so we actually traveled to Costa Rica on Sunday even though our flight wasn’t until Tuesday morning. After the bus ride went so smoothly, despite the border, I was regretting our decision because there was not much to do. That was before the Montezuma’s revenge kicked in. While we were on the bus a guy came aboard and was selling food and drinks. Everyone was buying it and it looked pretty good. MISTAKE. Never buy food from a random dude with a cooler. I’m just now feeling better.

At any rate we hung out in Alajuela the next day just picking up random stuff like shampoo. It was so much nicer than San Jose so we were glad we chose to stay out there rather than in the city. Our hotel in Alajuela was owned by this German couple and everyone at the hotel was German too. It was kinda weird, but the owners were super nice and helpful. Breakfast was pretty good too with fresh blended juice and all kinds of different jams to choose from for the toast.

We caught a cab at 4:30 in the morning to the airport and everything went off without hitch. I’m just glad it wasn’t busy because there are extra steps you have to do when leaving Costa Rica which translates to more lines. You have to pay this “departure tax” of $26 in a separate line. Once that is paid you have to do the usual airport lines and waiting. Our flight to Buenos Aires was also pretty uneventful. We stopped in Panama City which is a really strange airport. The place is like a mall, but almost entirely filled with electronics stores. I don’t know why; they weren’t a good deal, but people were going crazy and buying everything.

We arrived in Buenos Aires around 11pm via a taxi from the airport. The car was new, the road was smooth, there were no potholes, and no weird smells. It’s amazing the things you take for granted, but it was a really nice change. Our hostel in Buenos Aires was in the San Telmo neighborhood and called Ayres Portenos. It’s a tango themed hostel with lots of cool paintings and decorations. The pictures to the right is of the common area right outside our door and of our door itself. However, and this is the reason that I’m writing this post now instead of back in Buenos Aires, the internet was slow there. Imagine AOL dialup, but shared across 10 computers. It was that bad. Top that off with us trying to book an airline ticket to fly to El Calafate (southern Argentina) using websites that are constantly crashing or going down. It was a joke. One day we literally spent 5 hours trying to book stuff. It turned out that all flights to El Calafate were either ridiculously priced ($1000) or sold out. We had to try to plan an entirely different trip using this horrible internet. It took forever and was so frustrating. We finally decided to head to Mendoza first (wine country). We booked a ticket on the AndesMar website which coincidentally went down in the middle of trying to book our ticket. We switched to another website that was horrible and all in Spanish. After struggling through that forever the AndesMar website came back online and we booked through there. I’m having a hard time conveying how frustrating this process was. Things would happen like you’d type all your information into an online form, then it would just randomly erase. Type it again, erase. You didn’t even press a button or touch the computer and the website would erase stuff or crash all while taking 5 minutes to load a single webpage of only text. Their programmers must be serious idiots. Another frustrating thing is that hostels are booked up everywhere along with airlines. Of course half the time their websites are down, so we spent some time in offices in Buenos Aires only to find out things like the planes are owned by the Air Force and they are being used so there are no flights. AGHH!!! FINALLY we were able to book a bus from Buenos Aires to Mendoza AND find a place to stay that was not booked up.

The remainder of our time in Buenos Aires was just spent walking around checking out San Telmo (the kinda edgy artsy neighborhood our hostel is in) and the surrounding areas.

The city is really beautiful and cosmopolitan, kinda like a cross between New York and Paris. Everything is so much cleaner than in Central America and the people also dress really nice. Of course this means everything is more expensive so in Buenos Aires we found prices only about 25% cheaper than the US. There are so many people there, though. Everybody walks as parking seems pretty crazy so the streets are sometimes packed. There is a subway, but we never rode it.

We walked several miles the last day we were there and went through different neighborhoods (we ate lunch near the giant tree in the picture above). We came across this huge hydraulic operated flower that closes at night using solar panels in its petals. The sign was in Spanish, but it said something about Lockheed Martin so that was kinda interesting.

Near there was the Recoleta Cemetery where Eva Peron is buried.  This place was a sight, massive, and filled with huge ornate mausoleums dating back to the 1800s.  We didn’t really stress about seeing too much there this time around so we didn’t do a whole lot. We will be back for an extended period come Christmastime. Plus, I couldn’t really drink or go out thanks to the Montezuma’s revenge from Costa Rica.

The bus terminal… Haha well this is mostly our fault due to poor planning, but it was an experience. Luckily the people working at AndesMar were so helpful. We arrived there via taxi 20 minutes later than we wanted. Our bus left at 7:55pm and we got there around 7:30 thinking “how difficult can this be? It’s a bus.” This was more like an airport, it had four separate terminals, its own ramps from the road just like an airport and over 90 offices of different bus companies. Holy crap. We were running around trying to find the AndesMar office; when we finally did find it they asked us where our tickets were. I said I didn’t have any because we booked online and they said I should have printed an email. Come to find out that this pure text, poorly formatted email I got that was all in Spanish informed me somewhere in the middle of it that I had to print it and show it in order to board. We got around that and they sent us on our way to the AndesMar bus. We ran through the throngs of people and found our bus which was almost done boarding. It said it left at 7:45, not 7:55. I was a little confused, and thought something was wrong. At that instant the girl from the AndesMar office came running up screaming “No bus! No bus!” What had happened was that we booked using AndesMar, but they are partners with other companies so we were actually on a bus operated by CATA. We had to run BACK upstairs to the offices and go to CATA, get our tickets printed, then run back down to the terminals and board the bus. Once again we literally sat down and the bus rolled out. Another close call.

If any of you have ever traveled to Argentina you know that the buses here are awesome. Each seat on this two level bus had a nearly full reclining seat, its own private LCD screen, curtains, blanket, pillow, wine, dinner. Everything! It’s basically like flying international first class, but on a bus. We still slept like absolute crap so we were pretty tired when we arrived in Mendoza at 9am.

Ham and cheese. I have to add this. People in Argentina have some sort of obsession with ham and cheese. Our dinner on the bus consisted of the following: a small ham and cheese sandwich, a ham and cheese wrap, ham and cheese quiche, loose ham and cheese, ham and cheese pieces on a small skewer, and the main course? Chicken cordon bleu, which guess what, is filled with ham and cheese. Literally the only items not containing ham and cheese in our meal were the roll and chocolate dessert. We suspected otherwise… Breakfast: ham and cheese sandwich. What the heck people? Are you addicts or something? I suspect a pig farmer conspiracy. We’ve been trying to avoid the ham and cheese sandwiches that are everywhere and in every café and restaurant here. Ham and cheese pizza, ham and cheese quesadillas, ham and cheese empanadas, ham and cheese on ham and cheese. I’m telling you they love the crap. Gross.

Finally on to where we are now, Mendoza, wine country of Argentina. We didn’t waste any time either. After taking a heavenly hot shower (first consistent hot water in weeks), we decided to do this bike riding wine tour. We rode a cab to Maipu and were dropped off at Mr. Hugo Bikes.

We recognized some people in there and found out they were from our hostel as well, two guys from Germany and another girl from Bermuda. We did the tour with them. Mr. Hugo, the owner, is just trying to get you drunk I think. He kept pouring us big cups of wine before we even left! We headed out and rode to the end of the line first.

It was kinda far, about 5 miles heading right into the wind. It was a little annoying because the tastings were not free and you just about were required to do the tour before you could taste. I don’t care that barrels are stored here and your grapes are picked there. That’s nice, give me wine. Haha. This bike tour was like torture, but not because it was boring or the wine wasn’t good. It was a blast and the wine was awesome. The reason it was torture was because we couldn’t buy the wine! They said it would cost about $150 to ship two bottles back to the US! We can’t carry it with us either because we are weight limited by the airlines.

We ended up splitting a really good bottle with the group to drink at dinner. It was their special reserve Malbec, each signed by the wine maker and covered in dust from years of storage. Only 4167 bottles were produced and it was considered a collection wine. It cost 95 pesos or about $25. It was their most expensive wine. Crazy right? All the wines were so cheap; normally they were priced around $7. Another reason it was so torturous. We made our way through a few other stupid tours and good tastings. We drank a bottle of some good stuff at our last stop before the chocolate factory. Mmmm chocolate. This place had handmade chocolate, stuffed olives, liquors, jams, and sauces. We got to taste a majority of them and they were all so amazingly good. We bought some chocolate. It’s gone already :O)

Today we are planning on planning. Haha. We are forced to plan ahead here because everything is so booked up. We need to book bus tickets, hostels, etc. We are going to stay a few more days here and probably do some more wine tasting. Next we are headed to Salta which is in the northwest of Argentina. From there we are going over to Iguazu Falls which is the picture in the title of this blog. Next, we fly from there to El Calafate to do some hiking in the Patagonian Andes. We make our way from there up to Bariloche which is famous for its chocolate and amazing views and lakes. Finally from there we will go back to Buenos Aires just before Christmas and spend about a month there. Better get to work!