ranch owned by Ronald Reagan. Pink and white mountain lilacs and peregrine falcons were out when I passed that way. Hunter House, the park’s information center, is the source for trail maps, but serious hikers will have to return to the Santa Monicas another day, for Mulholland awaits.
In many ways, the eight miles between Las Virgenes and Kanan Dume Roads is the most scenic stretch of Mulholland, and over the years moviemakers have agreed, coming to this vicinity to film movies from Ruggles of Red Gap to Mr. Blanding’s Dream House. What is so remarkable about this countryside is its versatility—parts of it look like Australia’s Outback, parts like Tuscany and the English moors. Three miles past Las Virgenes is Cornell Road, the turnoff for the Paramount Ranch, now a park complete with a western town set where Borax’s Death Valley Days was shot. Just beyond Cornell, Sugarloaf Mountain rises. To the left is the entrance for a diminutive private enclave called Malibu Lake, developed as a weekend retreat for movie folk by Cecil B. De Mille. The lake and cabins that surround it are surprisingly humble, but one can imagine the mogul leaning against the clubhouse gate in his jodhpurs.
Between Cornell and Kanan Dume Roads, a large tribe of motorcyclists rule Mulholland—as many slumming lawyers as Hell’s Angels. Their favorite watering hole is the Rock Store and Vern’s Deli, where you can sip a soda as you observe their rituals.
If by now the sun is setting, you’d be well advised to turn left down Kanan Dume Road to the safer, saner pleasures of the coast. On the other hand, there are still 15 death-defying miles of Mulholland to go before Arroyo Sequit Canyon funnels you out on the beach at Leo Carrillo State Park like a piece of mountain jetsam. Honk before rounding all hairpin turns. Watch for the random dumped corpse and rock slides that routinely narrow this stretch of Mulholland to one lane. Ignore the smashing views of the Pacific and the weird satellite dishes that stick out of the canyon like Mickey Mouse ears.
You may be somewhat wired when you reach the Pacific Coast Highway. By now, it might be Magic Hour, that crepuscular time the movies love. Up on Mulholland, the mountain lions and backseat smoochers are coming out, and the lights in the valley and basin are beginning to bloom. You could go back to see night-side Mulholland. After all, the road runs right to L.A., not straight, but true.
Somewhere around the 22,834-foot Aconcagua Peak, I decided that my highway map of Argentina hadn’t been a good buy; it was huge and unwieldy, with a tendency to antagonize bystanders when I unfolded it. Also, it showed the whole country—2,300 miles long from the Paraguayan border to Tierra del Fuego in the south—when I needed only a three-inch strip in the middle.
My 1,000-mile route began in Santiago, Chile, and took me over the Andes and across Argentina to Buenos Aires. I left Santiago on a Saturday morning in late February, with little more than a backpack and a bag, that map, and the certainty, gleaned from guidebooks, that it’s possible to go almost anywhere in Argentina by bus. Driving the whole way didn’t appeal to me. I could have flown, but I wanted to spot a gaucho on the pampas. And although a train does cross from Buenos Aires to Mendoza on the eastern flank of the Andes, there you’re stuck (though the disused tracks wind up the wild, lonely canyon of the Mendoza River and over the mountains at the 12,6000-foot Uspallata Pass).
However, Argentine bus companies ply routes that make a spider web of the map, with poetic names like El Porvenir (the future), 1 de Mayo (the first of May), and La Veloz del Norte (the speed of the north). So, of course, I romanticized the trip, poring over Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia and studying photographs in travel magazines of Argentine estancias now open as inns. I even got the buses themselves wrong, imagining chickens and bald tires; cheap, Argentine bus travel has more to do with loud, piped-in pop music, mini-skirted stewardesses, and subtitled movies made for American TV. If you pay slightly more, you can book a sleeper bus on overnight journeys, and bus stations in larger towns are remarkable minimalls.
Still, the reality of the trip didn’t make it any less an adventure. Were I to do it again, I would give myself more time so that I could detour at will to out-of-the way spots only touched on in guidebooks—birthplaces of famous Argentine statesmen, offbeat religious shrines, and the like. As it was, I saw the Andes, Mendoza, some of the country’s best-preserved colonial architecture in Cordoba, and a good deal of countryside.
I came to enjoy rolling into a town, getting a sightseeing map at the tourist information office (situated in most bus stations), and then striking off on foot in search of a hotel room. I was able to see a lot that way and felt free to do precisely as I pleased—although sometimes I made mistakes.
It might have been a mistake to book a more expensive shared taxi from Santiago to Mendoza instead of taking the less expensive bus ride, but a gregarious man in the Santiago bus station convinced me it would trim two hours off the seven-hour trip. I will never forget that ride in a battered chocolate brown Ford Falcon with three other utterly silent passengers and a driver who chain-smoked while I inhaled gas. He drove the Pan American Highway like a maniac, ascending the bone-dry, scrub-covered Andes, where little grows above 11,500 feet, flying around an amazing series of switchbacks leading to the border, and then finessing us through Customs and Immigration by exchanging a few chummy words with a uniformed guard at the barricade. Stunned by the swiftness of the ride and yearning to see the sights, I kept asking, “Donde esta el Aconcagua? Donde esta el Cristo Redentor?” Blithely, the driver gestured with his cigarette toward the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, but we never saw the statue of Christ erected in the mountains to celebrate the settlement of an Argentine-Chilean border dispute in 1902; it is off the road.
Clearly, if I wanted to see anything along this popular pass through the Andean cordillera, I’d have to go back. This proved easy enough, because Mendoza, where the taxi let me off, is western Argentina’s excursion central; from there, scores of tour companies take travelers into the mountains, for visits to the vineyards south of town, on whitewater rafting trips down the Mendoza River, and trekking along the 23-mile northwest approach to Aconcagua.
With limited time, I chose a daylong van tour that retraced the taxi’s route northwest along the Mendoza River, this time going slowly enough for me to appreciate the glitteringly metallic mountains. (Suddenly, I understood why Spanish conquistadores felt sure they concealed cities of gold.) We learned about General José de San Marin’s Andean guerilla battles with the Spanish in the early ninteenth century at a historic site in the oasis-like hamlet of Uspallata; took a tram ride up the deserted ski slopes at Los Penititentes, with snaggle-toothed peaks on every side; dipped our toes in the yellowish thermal waters at a natural bridge; walked a half-mile up Aconcagua, panting in the thin air; and visited Cristo Redentor. With outstretched arms, the statue gives a benediction to what is surely one of the bleakest places on earth, an abandoned border crossing—though “falling” might be a better word, since from the statue, it’s a 13,000-foot drop to Chile.
Meanwhile, inside the van, the portly driver, Alfredo, argued in Spanish about futbol and politics with a radio sports-caster from Buenos Aires; when I concentrated, I could almost understand. The newscaster occasionally deigned to talk to me, specifying that he had been taught “English English” in school. On the road back from Cristo Redentor, his girlfriend, a nurse with a shy teenage daughter, took out a vacuum flask of hot water and prepared
