Easter in Mendoza and the Andes

"Mendoza...." our Argentinian friends had told us, "...es hermosa. Es la ciudad mas limpia en todo el pais!" So we decided to go there and see if it really was this: a beautiful city and the cleanest in the whole of the country.

Hermosa, meaning beautiful, is quite a strong adjective in Spanish, also used to describe., amongst other things, beautiful women. Therefore, I was expecting another city to rank alongside the lovely ones that I've been fortunate enough to visit in my travels, such as Bath in the UK, Venice in Italy, Salzburg in Austria and Munich in Germany. Even my Lonely Planet guide book sung the city's praises, saying it was one of the most beautiful in the whole of Latin America.

So we set off on a two-hour internal flight towards the 'ciudad hermosa'. The landscape below had been transformed by agriculture into a kind of grid, and our trip carried us first two up, and then eight across on the giant gameboard that is the Argentinian 'interior', a term which corresponds with the Australian term 'outback' and the Devonian term 'middle of bloody nowhere'.

Soon the landscape was looking more and more parched and we caught a glimpse of the Andes rising behind the city and landed in Mendoza. Would it match up to its billing?

The answer soon became clear. As we left the airport in our hire car, we noticed that the roads had massive potholes and no signs whatsoever, making it easy to damage the car or get completely lost. Ahhh, hermosa thought I. Not since I was in Munich have I seen such lovely, well maintained and logically organised streets.

Next of all, our trip into the delightful city carried us past twin shanty towns, favelas, on either side of the road, surrounded by open air rubbish dumps on which children scavenged for something that they could later sell. Ahhh, hermosa. Not since I visited Bath have I seen such a architecture.

Then, when we'd found our hotel we decided to go out for a stroll. The city centre had a river running through it, which was running more or less dry, which unfortunately was not the case for the open sewers by the side of the road. How it made me remember the Danube in Vienna.Bloody Hermosa.

Finally, after finishing our meals we were sitting down outside a restaurant drinking a beer when local children came up to us, not begging for money, but asking us if they could have the scraps of food that we'd left on our plates. We happily gave them our food. Judging by the look of the poor kids they hadn't eaten or washed in days. It was yet another one of those 'hermosa' moments, demonstrating the unqualified success of the Argentinian government's welfare problem.

Fortunately, we knew better than to trust lonely planet and had arranged to drive up to the border with Chile to see Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the world outside of the Himelayas. The 200km drive from Mendoza was phenomenal, the mountains gradually growing in size and multiplying their shades of pink, red and grey as we headed up to 3000 metres in altitude. Here Daniela started to feel a bit of altitude sickness, so we explored the plateau and took some great photos. We visited the 'Puente de los Incas' where minerals contained in thermal hot water create multi-coloured rock formations. The surrounding colours were wonderful, as was the wind, which seemed to be talking to you, telling stories of far-off places. Here, a lungful of air was so pure that it almost made you drunk. A sign on the roadside said that we were 1,222kms from Buenos Aires, and only 150kms from Santiago, Chile.

This experience, us alone with the landscape, the whispering wind and sheer vastness of the Andes was, without doubt, hermosa.