Mendoza

Due to the gear shift issue, it was mid-afternoon by the time we arrived. Our friends were already in town at Che Picadas bar, watching the football and so we headed in to join them for the second half. I dived into the 2-for-1 mojito offer while Lee excused himself, quite possibly for present shopping.

Back at the vans that evening, we weren’t sure we’d have the quietest night parked up by the lake, but we hoped that being midweek we might get away with it. We were wrong.

As ever, focal points pull people. Whether it’s the car park, a lake or a view. You can normally guarantee if you park somewhere like that, you’ll get company. If you want a quiet night, don’t park next to the lake where the benches and toilets are — go park on the back road behind. I have to admit, however, I was not expecting angry drunken rap at 5am. He was right next to the car, with the rest of his group of friends. For the most part I picked out words like ‘kill’ and ‘kombi’. I’m not sure they were being used in the same sentence but nevertheless, we lay there and awkwardly listened to this for about an hour before they got bored and left. We decided that tomorrow we’d move.

Tomorrow, as it happened, was my birthday. Lee was up and out of the van before I crawled out of bed and he was gone a long time. He finally reappeared clutching a bottle of champagne and orange juice. Apparently this was a holiday here, Worker’s Day, and everything is shut. We had planned to go for a celebratory meal that evening. In the meantime, we sipped our traditional breakfast champagne while I opened my present and decided what to do that day.

Lee had bought me a fancy smartwatch, perfectly timed by the recent death of my old one. We decided we’d let it charge up first and then head out on a nice walk to not only give it a test but enjoy the lovely day. Our friends had already walked up to Cerro de la Gloria, a hill located toward the west of the park which features a monument to the Army of the Andes. They had mentioned that while the monument was interesting, the view was hidden by trees. We thought we’d head off ourselves for a look.

It’s a large park and just to walk across it to the base of the hill takes the best part of an hour. When we arrived we realised that there were in fact two hills. Cerro de la Gloria stood to the right while Cerro El Llorón stood to the left. From here at the bottom we could see that the view would be mainly trees if we took the right-hand hill and so we opted to leave the road here onto some small hiking trails for the other hill.

We hiked slowly up towards the summit, bypassing the odd jogger. I could now look at things like how far we walked, my heart rate and all manner of interesting things aside from the time. By early afternoon, we reached the top to enjoy a view out over the city.

When we returned back to the van, we packed away and told our friends we were going to move away from the lake. As it was a huge park there were lots of internal roads and spots to stop. Our friends had previously stopped on this other road and said it had been the quietest place they found. It was still near the toilets and so Buzzy joined us.

Later that evening, we headed out for a lovely celebratory birthday curry, made even nicer by the fact that we enjoyed it with friends.

I think one of the reasons that we don’t often enjoy big cities is because it’s just the two of us. Firstly it’s the money. Go to a restaurant, visit a museum, go to a bar. It all costs money and so we’re pretty selective. Secondly, we feel that cities are better with other people. If we’re going to spend money at a bar, it’s got to be something different. Why go out and buy a cheap beer there? Lee and I can sit in the van and have a drink for a fraction of the price. But when you introduce people then there’s a point. Often, it gets weirdly lonely. You are literally never alone — I spend every minute with Lee — but at the same time we have no friends or family we can see. We make friends and leave them behind constantly, but it’s different. Every time we meet someone new, we know it’s temporary. Now we really appreciate it when we not only meet people we get on well with, but also have some time together. They weren’t planning on leaving Mendoza for a bit, and as ever we were in no rush and so we stayed.

We spent several days in our new camping spot, which was blissfully quiet at night. That was good because we needed our sleep, having sat outside the campers for hours on end each night drinking Coke and Fernet and talking till the small hours of the morning in the freezing cold.

One day, we headed into town with them to visit a hostel. They had been before and it turned out that the owner was a past traveller and therefore very understanding of what it was like to live in a car. He’d let them in to use his showers for free and he also extended this kind gesture to us when we all turned up outside his door. Afterwards, feeling clean and refreshed, we went and wandered around the town, window shopping for mate cups. We also found a pool bar and despite the fact that Annie used to work in a bar with a pool table, we managed to not horribly embarrass ourselves. After, we stopped off for cheap empanadas before wandering home.

The following morning, we dragged ourselves out of bed to a knock at the door. Outside, market stalls were popping up all around and it became clear that we were in the way. We decided to move just around the corner to a new spot for what was clearly going to be a weekend market. With the stalls rapidly being constructed, we chucked the roof down and made it drivable. Then we tried to leave. At this point, it became clear that we were stuck in second gear. Nothing I did seemed to change that. I hoped it wasn’t a gearbox fault, because the last time we were stuck in second gear, that had been the reason why. Now it was clearly time to do something about it, but first several helpful people pushed us out of the parking space and I crept around to a new quieter piece of road in second gear.

We had our morning coffee and let the day warm up before dragging out the floor mat and crawling under. I gave the gearstick a waggle. Somehow it was even looser. It flopped around uselessly in the cab, clearly something somewhere was not attached.

From underneath Lee declared. “Well, I found it.”

This is in fact excellent news, as nothing that can be found underneath is that bad to fix. All the bad outcomes would have been out of sight in the gearbox casing. He re-emerged moments later, holding a broken piece of tube. For some reason, I found this particularly hilarious and so I sat in the sun, holding my piece of gearbox linkage and giggling hysterically for some time. It seemed that this had been on the way out for a while. It had snapped at the point where the bushings are supposed to sit. Here in the shaft are three holes to locate them, but also creating a naturally weak point. It seemed two parts of the three had gone some time ago, the ends long rusted over. A third remained and this is what had finally given up, the clean metal clearly showing where it had just broken.

This was not really a big problem, we just had to decide how to fix it. Did we drive the van to a welder, knowing that we only had second gear? Or did we attempt to fix it here? I didn’t much like the idea of driving around with only second gear in the city. It would leave us totally stuck if we had to stop on any hill. So we decided to take the piece to a shop instead. We got down the bikes, then realised Lee’s had a puncture. I went off to buy a puncture repair kit, but the shop was shut when I got there for that famous Argentinian four-hour siesta. There wasn’t much else to do except go back to the van and wait.

Later, I found a different shop and bought us some new glue for our puncture repair kit. Then we headed off to the nearest torno with the broken-off end of tube. My idea was to get him to fit a metal rod inside and weld it in with enough still protruding that I could hammer it down into the other end of the shaft. It’s not possible to remove the linkage completely without removing the engine. This seemed like a decent enough fix and the tornero happily agreed to do it for £6 by midday the next day. That would give us just enough time for the weekend plans to continue.

#

I cycled back the following morning, picked up the piece and paid the man. He’d made a nice job of it and I figured it’d be a quick enough fix. While Lee went out to record some video, I set to work bashing the rod back in. The machinist had made it a lovely tight fit which was great, but did mean I needed to line it up well, which was a little awkward because it wasn’t possible to see the back. I committed, and smashed it in with a hammer, securing it afterwards by drilling and tapping in a small grub screw. By the time Lee got back, I was ready to refit the linkage and after another hour or so, we had the gears back. Just in time. We hopped in Ruby and got ready to leave. We headed out to stock up at Carrefour, tagging along behind Buzzy as we tried to re-learn the positions of all our gears. We were off to visit our friends Carlos and Rosa and, being the lovely people that they are, they were happy for us to bring friends.