Bariloche-a fairytale!

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Heh,
Wow! Can´t believe it´s almost Christmas time! It´s great here-the trees, decorations etc have only gone up in the last week or 2. It doesn´t feel like Christmas though as it´s so warm.

Anyway, Mendoza was a fantastic city! It´s pretty famous for it´s wines in particular. The highlight of our few days there was a bike tour of some of the wineries. We rented bikes from Mr Hugo (a legend who just rapidly rabbits on in Spanish, laughing away so we just laughed too))and spent the entire day cycling around wineries, a chocolate liquor factory and an olive oil factory-drinking and eating and cycling...It was great fun. the weather was fab and the wine and chocolate were good. There are wineries everywhere-a lot of them just family run boutique wineries. Malbec wine is the seemingly the best.
The city itself is really cool. In the mid 19th century it was mostly destroyed by an earthquake. As a result they rebuilt the city with wonderfully wide streets (for the rubble to fall in to if another earthquake ocurred) and fantastic plazas (for the people to congregate in for the same reason). There are great places to eat, lots of street entertainment, people enjoying long siesta lunches, great bars, shops, parties-lots of money and good looking people. We stayed in Chimbas hostel. it was really nice but a good 25 min walk into the city and very quiet(everyone was whispering) with a cat who spent most of her time on the kitchen worktop. We did really enjoy chilling in the pretty little garden and we met a lovely couple from Cork who are on their way to Cambodia, where she has spent the last 2 summers and hopes to set up an orphanage.

On Saturday evening, we took a 17 hour overnight bus to Bariloche in the Patagonia region in Southern Argentina. The journey was definitely our best yet. Great food-stuffed pork for dinner(bet you're all jealous with the pork crisis at home!!!)and our host was great-we even played bingo, in Spanish. It´s amazing here-my favourite place to date and I will definitely be back. Snow-capped mountains, beautiful blue lakes, beautiful "log" houses, lush green landscape-it´s straight out o a fairytale! To top it off, every second shop sells homemade chocolate and there is the most fabulous ice-cream. you culd stay here for a month and eat somewhere different every night. Dinner is free in our hostel every night so we´ve been availing of that as Argentina is pretty expensive compared to Peru and Bolivia. It´s Summer here now but there is brilliant skiing here in the winter-I can only imagine how beautiful it is then. Our hostel is pretty cool-The Marcopolo Inn-good breakfast (Brown rolls-so delighted to get away from all the white bread), free dinner, cool bar. There are a lot of middle age and older people staying there too-less expensive than a hotel but just as good as a base. We rented bikes here too to cycle around the lake-amazing scenery. We did get lost though and ended up cycling on a dirt track for about 40km-we´re still finding it hard to sit down!!!!

Tonight, we head to Buenos Aires for 6 days. It´s a 22 hour bus journey so here´s hoping we have a good host and some more bingo!!!

Exx

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