Just a week ago, the post published a note titled “On the other side of the world: what is the furthest city from Mendoza like?”. In it, thousands of Mendoza residents learned about the city that is located at the antipodes of Mendoza, that is, the city furthest from the Land of Sun and Good Wine.
After the publication of the note, messages, curious data and some stories that related Mendoza residents to different parts of the planet and that they had things to tell about the antipodes.
But one of the stories particularly caught our attention: “I have a friend who has a friend who traveled to the antipodes of Mendoza because he wanted to go as far away as possible”. A couple of messages later, and with the mediation of these friends, the Post contacted Franco.
Frank He is from Mendoza, he is dedicated to the audiovisual industry and has lived in Buenos Aires for some years. His trip was about 10 years ago and Due to a “matter of calculations” he did not arrive in Shiyan, but in another city.
Shiyan, the antipode of Mendoza.
Franco has lived in Buenos Aires for six years, in “the Republic of San Telmo”, as he calls it after having fallen in love with the place. He works at the Museum of Modern Art, where he is an audiovisual technician and is in charge of the museum’s auditorium.
He says that during his trip “I thought about Mendoza a lot, because I left Mendoza loaded.” Days before leaving, a relationship had ended and the production company he had set up had been dismantled. His work at the Cine Universidad had ended and his life had taken a resounding change.
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Franco’s trip
That end of 2013, many of Franco’s projects were closing. He had just filmed a film called “El Silencio” with Andrés Llugani, they finished filming and editing. “I left before the premiere,” Franco revealed.
As for his personal life, His change at work and love level also made him rethink several things. “It seemed to me that It was a good time to let it all outbut instead of setting up a beach bar on one beach in Brazil I was on another,” said the interviewee.
“I really liked to read, research about Russia, culture, music, literature, cinema,” he revealed. So, in that context I thought about going to see Russia, about going away from Mendoza. And, in that context, it occurred to him to go as far from Mendoza as he could: to the antipodes of his hometown.
Cinema, one of Franco’s passions, led him to become interested in the “Far East.”
“At the end of 2013 there were no antipodean search engines on Google. In the note the other day I saw that there is one,” he explained. Then, he turned to a friend who had some knowledge of the matter. “Roughly speaking we did the calculation and we did it based on Dorregoin the house where I lived, on Brandsen Street,” Franco explained.
“I’m going to go wherever I can, to start from scratch”, cont. And he began to prepare everything for the trip. A trip that would bring many more surprises and challenges than expected.
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“The day before I left Mendoza I cut my hair and shaved my entire face. The plane ticket with final destination in Beijing cost me $1,040.“, he remembered. He left from Santiago, stopped in Atlanta and from there flew to Seattle. And from the American northwest he undertook a trip to the Chinese capital.
“It was the most impressive flight of my life, from Seattle to Beijing. I was going very counterclockwise, I think it lasted, I don’t know, four hours or three clock hours. And it was through the Bering Strait, ah this part where Alaska and Russia almost touch each other, then it was sea, glacier, sea, glacier, a little piece of an island, another island and an eternal sunset“It was always getting dark,” he recalled excitedly before one of the strangest experiences he had to live – until then -.
The Bering Strait, where the plane went through on its way to Beijing.
Unlike the “two days of travel” that we calculated in the previous note, Franco revealed that his experience was not as satisfactory. “From the time I left Mendoza until I arrived in Beijing something like 70 hours passed, once in Beijing it was very difficult, plus I was exhausted from traveling”.
The fact that he shaved his head played a bad trick on him, in China they did not recognize him because of his photo and he lost time in being able to leave the Beijing airport. I had not brought a phone and those tools that seem so useful to us today (Google Maps, translators and so on) were not as efficient as they are now.
“Maybe Google doesn’t work in China, so you don’t have Google Maps. It was an odyssey,” the traveler from Mendoza recalled. “They kept me for about two hours, I got out, there were no more trains, it was one in the morning. Getting to where I was sleeping was unusually difficult, like five hours, no one, no one spoke English,” he recalled.
The ancient and modern Beijing, capital of China.
Furthermore, the address of the hotel he was going to was written in Latin characters, something that few people in China know how to read. “I was in Beijing for a couple of weeks and I said I’m going to look for the opposite,” he said.
“I took a train for something like 35 hours or 40 in a chair. What is called hard seat, that third class. Everything was very dirty, the Chinese were particularly noisy and extremely dirty. It was my first train trip long distance,” Franco said.
“From there I got off and took a secondary train, much smaller, much more uninhabited. I was on that one for about six hours and there I arrived at a town called Tunxi,” he explained.
Franco’s route to reach the antipode he calculated, only 90 km from Shiyan.
However, due to a calculation error -beyond the distance between City of Mendoza and Dorrego- It did not reach Shiyan, I didn’t even look for that place. “According to my calculations, which I later understood were a little wrong, I was not in Hebei where your note appears. But in the next province called Anhui,” he explained.
Then I took a bus to Huangshan, within the same province of Anhui. After arriving in that city after a 4-hour trip, I boarded a van for two more hours bound for Ren Min Lu.
One of Franco’s photos in the little town he arrived at: Ren Min Lu.
“It was a rural part, no one spoke English, everything was with signs, I didn’t have a telephone, there was no translator at hand, I didn’t have maps, it was all very cumbersome. But today from a distance I see it as a process of humanization. gigantic, it was the most effective and efficient way to work on patience,” said the interviewee.
From the city where Franco settled to the opposite of Mendoza there are about 90 kilometers.. A minimum distance, but one that deposited him in another province. “I arrived at this place, it was a town of 2,000 inhabitants. All for signs to let them know that I wanted a place to sleep, the same to eat. I found a dining room and I pointed to the plate, to tell them that I wanted to eat,” he recalled.
It was a place with little or no tourism, with plantations and people who lived off the harvest. “The Chinese were friendly, they looked at me, they smiled at me, some came up, took a selfie and ran away,” he recalled with a laugh.
The streets of Ren Min Lu, in rural Anhui.
On the other hand, I remembered having seen many small towns “like Venice”, crisscrossed by canals in which people navigated to get from one place to another. The tourist influx to these places comes from China itself. Franco walked, covered hundreds of kilometers on foot and reached places he did not expect to see.
His idea was to go as far as he could, and he achieved it – or was only 90km away from achieving it. His adventure had just begun. After that trip through China, Franco was in Manchuria, Siberia, then he was in Mongolia and when his visas – and obviously his savings – ran out, he went to Germany for a while.
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There he worked and lived for some years. Regarding what he generated in China, he says that “there are few photos, and the videos are all raw. I also wrote a diary, I don’t know what I will find when I read it again.”
Regarding his experience and his time traveled, Franco explains that “I felt far from my relationships, from the people I loved, and that made me a little more aware of finitude. What was so safe before, now no longer It was. So every time I meet someone, family, friends, it is a moment where one gives oneself completely.”
The humidity and the old buildings, two of the characteristics of the place where Franco lived for a few days.
Every now and then, Franco returns to his native Mendoza. “The affections, the colors, the smells, the mountains summon me,” she reveals. “I’m always there in some way or another, my family is there, my friends are there. Although I don’t live in Mendoza, I don’t rule out living in Mendoza and I suppose that when I return to Mendoza I would like a life that is less city-dwelling and closer to the city.” mountain,” he reflected.
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