We believe that today was the first time that two Australians flew together in the Andes. (Where are the Andes? On the end of your armies!)

The guys tell me that there’s some big mountains around here. The 13,000ft volcanoes look like hills so the big ones are really big. Today I flew with Augustin, who was the tow pilot for the Perlan Project back in 2006. We went up to within 20km of the big mountains.

I can see the mountains on the GPS map in the cockpit but I can’t see them out the front window. I’m taking up a collection to send a few fire extinguishers to Chile so they can put out the volcano that is filling the air with ash.

Ok, with some normal glider pilot prevarication, plus some work emailing and calling people in our next destination, plus some loose spark plugs in the engine, we finally launched at 5:20pm.

In 2,5 hours of wandering about the sky, we’ve done 196km. I mean, really, when the computer says you’re going to arrive back home at 8000ft above circuit height, it’s not even local soaring. It’s more like staying within the fenced boundary of the airfield.

Tomorrow, the plan is to fly some straight lines and score some OLC distance.

“Well, you’re an Andes pilot now, my friend,” says Tago.

Here we are at 14,000ft, just above some pretty major volcanoes at 13,000ft, looking out to the Andes to the west. The thermal cloudbase is probably as high as 18,000ft and we can see a lot of mountains higher than our current altitude. But this isn’t even the main spine of the Andes, it’s the Cordillera del Viento; the “Corridor of Wind” that is a barrier ridge before the main Andes.

Strapping in with my check instructor, Ramon Chialvo.

Well, after 2 days of driving, we’ve arrived in Chos Malal and rigged the glider.

We passed several herds of goats on the highway. Tago said “run one of them down and we’ll have enough for dinner.”

When we get to Chos Malal, we are greeted by Onda the airport dog. Onda means “Wave” in Spanish. The restauraunts here know the glider pilots so well, they also know that Onda doesn’t like cheese in his doggie-bag.

We spent a bit of time doing an inventory of the trailer contents. We still haven’t found they key but we found someone else with a Cobra trailer who has a key which fits. Then, just before we wanted to rig the glider, the wind sprang up. Fortunately we had lots of helpers.

The big drive actually started earlier than I predicted, but not by much. The main route down the foot of the Andes is Route 40. Unfortunately, despite Tago calling at least 8 people to ask about the condition of the road, the best answer we got said that AR40 would be impassable for a glider trailer. So we turned away from the Andes and onto the plains.

This is the land of the big sky. We watched thunderstorms build during the day, drove through rain and lightning and came out the other side to witness fantastic mammatus cloud formations.

(Note the “Argentinian lock” on the front of the trailer - we haven’t found where the key is hidden yet.)

Our first stopping place was having an oil company conference, so every single hotel was booked out. We ended up driving late into the night to get to Neuquen. (Only the 2nd “u” is silent, so it’s pronounced a bit like “Newken”.)

Here are the boys, Morgan and Tago, driving late at night…

Yesterday, the container was supposed to be released from customs Mañana de la Mañana. You don’t even have to guess at the outcome of that one.

About 2pm, we get the phone call: “It’s ready NOW.” Then it turns out that the crane isn’t available but there is a ramp that will allow the truck to back up to a loading dock and push the trailer out there. We get there and Tago and I look at the ramp and say “This is going to be difficult.” Well, that was an understatement. In hindsight, we should have insisted on the crane. It would have taken the same 2 hours but we could have sat in the airconditioned car while we waited instead of risking being crushed by the thing rolling down the ramp.

The first disappointment is the container seems to have been dropped in transit, smashing the jockey wheel clamp.

We find more damage inside, fortunately, all of it minor.

Then we end up using 2 forklifts to ease the trailer down the ramp.

Jorge Caliri, our customs and shipping agent spent the whole tine with us, negotiationg last-minute changes from Customs and getting his hands dirty too.

Finally, we reverse the trailer into the local gliding club hangar. (More pictures to come of the great stack of gliders in the hangar.)

So the big drive starts tomorrow morning; Mañana de la Mañana. I’ll take bets on 2pm.

The tree-lined streets of Mendoza are absolutely beautiful. This is the central business district, as we drive to the money-changing company.

The buildings are all low-rise due to the earthquake risk. Even the Hyatt hotel is only 5 storeys high. This makes the CBD much more spread-out than I am used to. You do need to drive around and then usually you pay for parking in a dedicated parking lot. There are no high-rise parking garages, of course. Today, Tago parks on the street for the first time and someone comes up and gives him a little blue ticket. This is actually the carwash, out on the street. The car will be clean when we come back to it.

You do have to wonder about a financial system where they prefer to use another country’s currency. The big transactions we need to pay for are all in US dollars. When we call the company to ask if our wire transfer has come through from the USA, we are asked not to talk about it over the phone in case the authorities are listening. When we go to the company, everyone is smiling. Tago personally knows the security guard at the door, the owner and the owner’s daughter, so we get preferential treatment in the VIP rooms.

But when we get to the insurance company to hand them their big wedge of cash, it turns out that they just converted the price into USD as a convenience for me. The actually wanted to be paid in Pesos. Fortunately they are amenable to working out an exchange rate and the deal is done. We have our insurance.

Usually when I’m in a foreign country, I don’t need such big sums of cash. With credit cards I don’t use much cash and when I do, I just get it from a local ATM machine. This costs a few bucks and the exchange rate is always a few cents off the headline rate but you get local currency very quickly and easily. So, find a cash machine in Mendoza? They do exist but you have to look hard as they are aways protected by a foyer. The machine says it’s going to charge me $17 peso fee - less than 4 bucks - so this seems OK to me. Later on, I check my bank account. They ripped out a $12AUD fee and the exchange rate was absolutely ruinous. On the same day that the dodgy Cambio dealers on the street were giving me 4.45 pesos per dollar, my own bank gave me 3.98 pesos per dollar. OK, lesson learned, and it only cost me a hundred pesos for the experience. Although, I am certain that without Tago there, I would NOT have got such a good rate from the guys on the street.

OK, so we’re ready to pick up the glider Mañana de la Mañana. Then Tago gets a phone call. It seems that the customs computer system is down and they can’t enter the insurance policy today. This is a problem because if they enter it tomorrow then the exchange rate will be different. We must have USD240.000 of insurance and the insurance policy is written in Pesos. It doesn’t matter if the rate goes up or down because there will be a discrepancy and the computer can’t release our cargo if there’s a mismatch. Didn’t I tell you that the Argys teach bureaucracy in school science classes?

While we’re waiting, I get to take Tago’s mother’s dog for a walk in the park. Her name is Isis but they always seem to call her Chachi or Cookie. I get taught that the command to cross the street is ¡Vamos! [let’s go!] and off we go.

Obviously playing in the roadside irrigation canals is a favourite on a hot day.

Did I mention that they look after their trees here? They give them every support possible.

A phrase I’m hearing a lot is mañana de la mañana. The Argys will say it so fast that I had to ask what they were saying. They say it like MañanaMañana with only the merest hint of a “d” in the middle and absolutely no sign of the “la” remains. They say it faster than I can say one Mañana.

The one Spanish word Mañana is used for two different concepts in English. It means “Tomorrow” and it also means “Morning”. So when you want to say “Tomorrow Morning” you say la Mañana de la Mañana which literally means “the morning of the tomorrow”. If you want to say “this morning” then the correct translation is the literal este mañana. Simple enough.

Of course, the actual morning being before 12:00 midday, you don’t really expect to get anything done, do you? We were told that we could pick up the trailer yesterday. Of course that didn’t happen. I wasn’t expecting it to be that easy. So, we spent yesterday finding more paperwork to be filled in. The filling-in has been filled and faxed and filed so we need to be ready to pick up the trailer Mañana de la Mañana. Hmm, do we have a trailer yet? No. There’s an insurance policy we need and this one’s going to cost us $7000USD. So I need to get more money wired over from the USA. Guess when the money is supposed to arrive? Mañana de la mañana.

Tago is hard at work on the phone and Nextel (a kind of point-to-point simplex [push-to-talk] radio system that looks like a phone but it’s not a phone.)

Flying in to Mendoza, it is obvious that it’s an oasis in the desert. The city and surrounding farmland is supported by an extensive irrigation system. Well, calling it “extensive” is really an understatement. Every single street has an irrigation ditch down both sides.
Every tree in the region has been planted and is constantly maintained by the irrigation. If this was a city in Australia, there would be just a few big trees in the park and smaller ones less than 5 years old. Here, every street is lined with beautiful big trees and the park is a botanic garden.

The other thing I noticed is the cars. It’s like the 80s and 90s never happened here. The cars are either old Renault 12 rustbuckets or they are reasonably new Fiats and Chevrolets. They have had lots of different import policies over the years. Right now, it has clamped down again so the cars you see here will probably be the same for the next 20 years.