Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Longer run this morning, up to the local peak with the aim of getting a good early-morning view of the Andes - turns out you don't really get a view of the main range there, just the initial range which is quite impressive enough. It was almost continuously uphill for the first 6.5km but never steeply so (250 metres climb in total), to the summit of Cerro de la Gloria, renamed some decades ago in honour of a military campaign (at least they didn't call it Cerro Malvinas Argentinas). Felt OK, if somewhat grinding, on the climb, but pretty ordinary on the descent (with a diversion past the Mendoza meteorological observatory), and ended up going not quite as far as planned.

The reason for this ordinariness manifested itself as soon as I cooled down - something strained in my upper back (not the usual spot). I was thinking "could be fun trying to haul a pack around with this", but it seemed to settle down more or less by the end of the day.

The main agenda item for the day was a long bus trip - a bit of a nothing leg to an overnight stop in Neuquen, ahead of a connection to Bariloche the next morning. With a 10pm scheduled arrival it always looked like a long day, particularly when we left 30 minutes late.

I'd seen a march when I arrived in Mendoza which I gathered was something to do with objections to a mine and its potential effect on downstream water supplies (important in a region which depends on irrigation), and there were a few more relevant signs on the road south (my Spanish may be limited but you don't need much to work out what's going on with "NO A LA MINA" and "AGUA CONTAMINADA"). It got a bit more serious when we were held up for about 45 minutes coming into General Alvear, a town about 300km south of Mendoza, by a protest, but that turned out to be only the warm-up.

The next stop was about 10km out of town on the way south. Here there was a kilometre-long line of heavy vehicles (cars were finding other ways around) whose cause we all worked out pretty quickly, and it was apparent it was going nowhere in a hurry (word was it had already been going for four hours). It did get nowhere in a hurry; we were eventually stuck there for six hours, stretching well into the evening. I was thinking this trip wouldn't be complete without colliding with South American street politics at some point, and this was it. After the first couple of hours most of us spilled out onto the road which made it hard to tell who was involved in the protest and who wasn't (by this point a secondary blockade had appeared pretty well next to our bus). It was all quite a festive atmosphere with only two bits of aggro that I saw (and only one piece of horn-blowing) - surprising me a bit as patience isn't really part of the Latin American stereotypes you think of. (I suspect the protest had overwhelming local support, including from the police who were nowhere to be seen until it was pretty much all over). There were a couple of Brits on the bus so at least I had someone to talk about the situation with.

Once it became apparent that we were going to be several hours late, I was quietly hoping that it would drag on for a couple more (on the grounds that I'd rather spend most of a night on a bus than half of it on a bus and half in a bus station). We eventually got moving again shortly after 10, with six or seven hours still ahead of us. In what was to be the first of several surreal moments of the coming hours, as we went past the main protest site the crowd cheered us passing as if we were a football team bringing home some important silverware.

Next step was a test of my counting skills in Spanish - the bus bingo game (won by one of the Brits - I wouldn't have been able to do anything with the prize, a bottle of Mendoza's finest, anyway).