Zesty Lemon

Click here to read part 2.

Landing in Madrid, I was staggered at how cold it was. Whilst I had been preparing for the fridged temperatures I was likely to encounter on the mountain, it stupidly hadn’t even occurred to me that southern Europe had a winter. I had nursed myself through Gatwick wearing just a lightweight shirt on the thought that after takeoff, I’d not have to worry about being cold. However, when I was walking across the tarmac in the Spanish capital with nipples so stiff they could score glass, I made a mental note to be more fastidious in my travel attire for the return journey.

We had hoped that the lengthy stop of 10 hours would give us chance to escape the airport and mosey around Madrid but as a result of the delay departing London, we would risk missing our onward flight if we went exploring. On this basis, we limited our excursions to the transit lounge which transpired to be a dingy, airless corridor with a duty free shop and a small café. As everyone knows, airport food outlets have an unrivalled monopoly on innocent travellers, and I usually go to great lengths to avoid lining their pockets. However, being on the road since the early morning and already suffering from light-headedness, I paid over 12 Euros for a sandwich ‘platter’ that looked like it had been spat on by Thor and a drink that must have been bottled directly from the Manzanares river.

Many hours later when we did finally board the onwards flight to Argentina, my fears regarding onboard entertainment were confirmed. The aircraft was old, the legroom; poor, and the cabin crew attractive only to the most advanced beer goggle sufferers. Making my way through the isle, I counted the rows to my seat and found that I had been placed just in front of small children. In fairness to them, they were impeccably behaved but as I parked myself, I couldn’t help but notice how invitingly infant sized they make plane windows! Almost straight after take-off they began to server dinner. No sooner had I finished my compartmentalised gruel, I dived straight into my backpack for the knockout drugs that I had bought the previous week. Sceptical, I scowled at the packet and whilst I lazily considered the lack of immediate medical assistance in the vicinity, I ingested two of the capsules.

To my great delight, the tablets did their work and I woke up just an hour before we were due to land in Buenos Aires; and after another helping of gruel, we touched the tarmac in South America. Resisting my urges to blurt out inappropriate comments to the immigration official, we entered the baggage reclaim hall and were surprised to find that all of our bags had survived the transfer in Madrid unscathed and were rotating around the carousel.

The next step was to arrange our own transfer to the domestic airport to catch our onward flight to Mendoza. As Adventure Peaks had provided no guidance in the matter, we elected their representative to go and arrange this for us. I then parted with $10 and had my bags loaded into a van. This brought to the surface something else I detest. Tipping. My conceived idea of tipping is that it’s optional and should only be given if truly exemplary service has been offered. The culture where gratuity is expected is rapidly growing and trades on the guilt of the customer living up to a predefined agenda. I speak on principle not on experience in this eventuality as in my jet-lagged state, I handed the porter $2 of unnecessary compensation.

Trying to gloss over this, after a short and nervously eccentric drive across the outskirts of the city, we arrived at what was to be our final transit point. Situated by the river, the Aeropark looked very run down and after venturing inside, it was confirmed to be very run down. Imagine a 100 square foot student bedsit. Add over a thousand people, a crackly speaker system and a couple of live chickens running around and you would be approaching the picture. It honestly looked like a scene from Borat and as we fought our way through the masses with our considerably outsized baggage, we wondered if there was any chance of catching our plane. Some sly elbowing ensued to stake our place in the queue line and by muttering some undiplomatic comments about the Falklands war; we ended up monopolising a check-in desk for our travelling circus.

The delay in booking in for our flight meant that we had a rather lively walk straight to the departure gate. In the UK, the security procedures alone would make this impossible – any brisk movement would probably be interpreted as an act of terrorism and necessitate a cavity search so violent that it would be guaranteed to put an abrupt end to any swiftness in bipedal progress for at least the next few days. In Latin America however, they clearly aren’t too bothered about domestic travellers as I found out when I triggered every security alarm known to the airport and was still allowed to proceed with only a casual scowl by a disinterested security official.

I was still reading my Mendoza notes that I had researched as we took off from Buenos Aires and in doing so; I rediscovered something I had found out in preparation for the trip. The airport that we were due to terminate at in Mendoza, was also the unscheduled origin airport of the fateful Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 which crashed in the Andes, survivors of which resorted to cannibalism and were portrayed in the 2003 film; Alive. With a touch of irony, the only emotion that this realisation stimulated was that of hunger and the rest of the flight passed without excitement.

Having been on the road for a long time and feeling the lethargy that accompanies long haul travel, I think we all breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing the hotel emerge as we rounded a corner on the leafy Latin American street. Encouraged by the thought of a hot shower and a tasty steak, I hauled my bags from the minibus being careful to avoid the gaze of a manipulative porter and made my way into the hotel reception area. The hotel décor hadn’t aged well but compared to the deprivation we would shortly be embarking to, it was a slice of heaven. Waiting in the queue, I noticed two clocks behind the reception desk on the wall. I’ve stayed in hotels before where timepieces proudly display their information in London, Paris and New York but here, one was listed as Mendoza and the other; Chile. I’m not sure if it was irony, but they were both telling the same time – thinking about it, they were a couple of minutes different so maybe that was the joke after all. We were escorted to our room by one of the hotel staff members who didn’t seem too pleased with our bustling arrival.

By this point, we were all so tired and in need of refreshment that I honestly didn’t care. I simply parked my cases, lay down on the bed and contented myself with the thought that at least; unlike our porter, I didn’t have a face that looked like a Crème Egg.

Part 4 is here…

Tags: Aconcagua, Adventure Peaks, Mendoza, South America, Travel