A for Away

I have finally arrived in Argentina, and I must say that Nico has done a fantastic job here.
The old house, the temporary hostel, has had the kitchen changed so that it is on the inside of the house and the new bathroom looks great - it just needs a shower-head and it will be up and running.

So far we've had a grand total of three guests. Three Dutch girls stayed here one night after going on a hike with Nico, Enrique and Sofi - it snowed on them up in the mountains...
Hopefully things will pick up a little soon. Enrique brings his horse-riding guests over to our place after their ride for beers and we show them what Mendoza country life is like, hand them a few business cards and hope for the best.

The new house is also coming along nicely. The corner posts for the skeleton of the house are all up and Nico has started building the bedroom walls. The builder, Pablo, was very happy to see me when I arrived on Wednesday - it seems Nico had run out of money and promised him that he would get some when I arrived.

It seems Oswaldo, the property caretaker, has decided to move on. It means we save P$500 a month for his pay, but we now have to do all the watering of the garden ourselves. This is not a small feat, remember we are pretty much in the middle of a desert. We have a constant stream of water to the property, so we just move hosepipes around during the day - Nico is slowly teaching me the watering process, on both properties.

I've started giving the place a good top to bottom clean - it's been boys living here for the last few years, and their idea of clean is not exactly what a hostel should look like. I've managed to do the kitchen and the new bathroom so far. hopefully I wil be able to do the rest of the house early next week, perhaps with a bit of local help. There are a lot of spider webs, and spiders, here that I don't do too well with...

One big piece of news is that we have decided to change the name of the hostel. Seems some of the hostels in town have heard of what's happening up here and are a little upset that we may be taking business away from them. They're angry with Enrique, and we don't want him to lose any business. So the new name of the hostel is:
Los Carolinos

I will leave the url for the blog as is for now, but will change the e-mail address and the url for the hostel website - when I finally get around to doing it.

No photo's for now, will get some time to upload them next week. We're going to Sofi's sister's wedding on Saturday evening, and I think it's pretty much a write-off for Sunday - since these people don't go to bed before 5 when they party.