Day 40 - Up to Villavicencio

Another bus tour up into the foothills of the Andes. Out of the city (at about 2,500 feet) and climbing gradually through the desert and into the Villavicencio Nature Preserve. While the city gets about 10 to 12 inches of rain a year, the preserve gets only about 4 inches. We were the only non-Spanish speakers among the 13 of us. Our guide explained various aspects of the flora and fauna of the desert. The desert is low scrub with no trees, thorny bushes, agave, and cactus. We went past a limestone mine and a big Holcim cement plant on the way into the preserve (there is a Holcim cement plant in Hagerstown). Then past the new Villavicencio bottling plant. The water is shipped around South America and we'd seen it in Chile, on the Eclipse, and everywhere in Argentina.

Our route followed the Argentine Ruta 7, formerly the only way to cross the Andes for hundreds of miles north or south. This is also the route taken by General San Martin in 1817, after liberating Argentina, as he crossed the mountains into Chile to continue his liberation campaign. The concrete road was rough and climbed steadily. The bus had trouble making the climb and the driver had to stop several times to repair a hose. The air conditioning worked poorly. We left the paved road for gravel and started up steep switchbacks.

We passed the old hotel and kept climbing. The view both up and down was spectacular, with traces of the road cut continuing to switchback up the mountainside and grand vistas of the plains below. There were wild flowers scattered among the rocks, snapdragons and jarinna, the regional flower. The switchbacks kept up but we stopped at one lookout at about 6,400 feet. We turned around and went back down to the hotel.

Hotel Villavicencio, named after the first prospector/settler in the 1860s, was build in the 1940s to provide a spa where visitors could take the thermal baths. The location had been a rest stop for people crossing the Andes long before that. Charles Darwin and the priest who eventually became Pope Pius IX stopped here. It flourished after WWII but fell on hard times in the 1970s, closing in 1978. It sat abandoned until the water company of the same name was taken over by the Danone water company of France. That company donated much of the land that now makes up the preserve. The hotel's facade has lately been restored and the grounds cleaned up. Preserve employees give guided tours (only in Spanish) and show a video (with English subtitles). We wandered around the grounds. Visited the small chapel with a fresco of the Last Supper behind the altar then walked the old terraced gardens, now devoid of flowers but still having the stonework basins and walkways. Our tour returned to Mendoza and dropped us at the hotel.Read more