Mendoza to Córdoba

In retrospect, we wish we'd spent another night in Mendoza. We had the time and could have spent it there, chilling, but you never know whether the next place will be better - stay or move on? It probably would have involved variations on a theme from the previous day, because we did manage to see a fair slice of the city. Ah well.

We're running through some of Argentina's biggest cities over this stretch and beyond:
Mendoza - 4th (885K population in 2009)
Córdoba - 2nd (1.37M)
Santa Fé - 9th (493K)
Resistencia - 11th (377K)

The journey from Mendoza to Córdoba is a story about SatNavs / GPS systems. Specifically, the TomTom that Clare bought me as a Christmas present. Before we left home, I did some googling and found out that there were embryonic map sets for Argentina and Chile available for the TomTom, and I bought them. The small size of the downloads reinforced my humble expectations, but overall I was very pleasantly surprised. I'll go into this further in a later post, but the SatNav with Argentinan or Chilean maps turned out to be a total game-changer, leading us to the very doors of hotels in foreign cities comprised entirely of side-streets.

So, here it is. South America isn't overloaded with road signs. The paths we've had to take to get in and out of various cities have seemed like labyrinth maps. But SatNavs have positives and negatives.

The road from Mendoza toward Córdoba starts out through poplar-lined avenues between olive groves, but soon blends into the miles of semi-desert we've mentioned before. At one point the lines on the road just stopped and the road smoothly forked on left and right with no signs or markings whatever to suggest which is the "right" or "main" direction.

Outside big towns, the current generation of TomTom maps lacks detail, with only the approximate line of major roads shown. This means that sometimes it says you're a quarter of a mile left or right of the road you're actually on and need to turn left or right to get back on it. At those times it just needs to be ignored. At other times it shows the road taking a sharp left or right turn, and you do have to obey.

Fortunately, in the case of the totally-unsigned junction, the SatNav just showed a curve to the left, which I followed and didn't live to regret.

On the other hand, some hours later we reached a roundabout. The road signs pointed right, which the SatNav claimed as 2 hours and 94 miles. However, the SatNav had been pointing straight on, ten miles and ten minutes less. We thought we'd be clever and follow the SatNav rather than the road signs. Big mistake. We got into the middle of this town and there were no sings to indicate the right way out. We tried various ways and ran out of tarmac every time. We tried to go back the way we'd come and found every road to be no entry or one-way the other way. The SatNav was no help because this was one of the places where it only knew the rough path of the road and its half-mile of uncertainty covered the entire town. After half an hour banging our heads against failed options, I asked a group of taxi drivers. The only way back to where we'd come into the town was out on backstreets about half a mile to the end of some tarmac, then take a sharp right and go looking for a roundabout (which we fortunately recognised, because that wasn't signed either). We were so grateful to get back to where we should have followed signs not SatNav, having lost well over 30 minutes trying to save 10.

This road did reward us, though. Through most of the journey we'd been approaching this very long and very high ridge, starting off by heading straight for it and gradually over hours bending left to run parallel. This road headed straight for the high ridge and wound up the side. Finally it ran along the crest, offering amazing views West far out over the plain we'd crossed - wow and photos!! The road then crossed the top and wound down the far side, with views East toward Córdoba.

There was a sting in the tail. After the earler experience we had to decide we should follow road signs rather than the Sat Nav. Unfortunately, later there was a sign to Córdoba off the big road we were following (National Route 20) and onto what turned out to be C45, winding tightly over a smaller ridge between us and our destination. The roads were harder work (tough at the end of a 6-7 hour drive) but quite fun for me, although a bit dizzy-making. At the end we rejoined Ruta 20, wondering where that had gone in the meantime. Ho hum.

The SatNav took us straight to the door of our accomodation. After the experience of Los Angeles, we'd resolved to always book ahead, generally using the Booking.Com app on my iPhone. However, we couldn't find anywhere on there we liked in Córdoba. Hence we went via TripAdvisor and a quick Google to find the Costa Rivera apartments, which we'd booked by phone and ended up really liking - not flash, but everything we needed and very friendly and helpful staff.

As we'd been approaching the city, we saw a big storm in the distance but approaching. As we parked and fled inside it was grey and threatening overhead with very strong gusts. We anticipated sitting warm inside looking out at nature's turmoil. However, the weather must have expended its fury upstream, as it swiftly cleared where we were, but left what was clearly far more water than usual in the local concrete-bedded "river" the following day.