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Published: January 1st 2011
Long time no blog!
We have done so much stuff since the last blog that I almost don´t know where to start. I guess since right after the last blog is a good place. On the last blog it was the day before Christmas eve. I had said that we planned to go on a bike wine tour Christmas eve but due to the holidays most wineries were closed until December 27 so we post-poned that trip.
In stead of the wine tour on Christmas eve we decided to take in Mendoza by doing a walking tour, and getting onto the Argentinan eating style. This includes eating late long lunches over wine with friends and dinner doesn´t happen until between 10-12 at night. We thought that wine was cheap in Chile but it turns out it is cheaper in wine country Argentina! Eating in Argentina has been great....steak with every meal! I´m not sure what a vegetarian would eat here.
In Argentina people celebrate Christmas on Christmas eve. We celebrated at the hostel with a giant BBQ that was put on for all of the guests. This BBQ was so much fun and it was good too, we
had so many different types of meat.
On Christmas day we headed to the aired lands between Mendoza and the mountains. We all went Ziplining here. This was a lot of fun, and was very different from most other zip lines as instead of being in the tree tops it was out in the open flying across desert like land. My favorite one was going across the river. The line dipped low in the middle and it looked like you´d go into the water.
After Zip lining Jason and I went Mountain biking. This was only cross country but it was definately harder then you´d think because it was so hot outside, it must have been about 40 degrees out! This was actually a really neat ride, the aired land was so different from most places that i´ve been to.
Boxing day in Argentina had most places still closed. So we decided it would be a nice day to hit up a pool. This was a large outdoor pool right in Mendoza. I think we were the only tourists there. It was a pretty fun day just chilling out and trying to avoid dying of heat exhaustion.
Getting into the pool was different. You had to pass a medical inspection which involved them looking at your hair hands, feet and even your groin!
The next day was finally the day we had all been waiting for and the main reason for going to Mendoza....the wine tour! We went with 13 people from the hostel to MR.Hugo´s wine tours. Mr. Hugo starts you out by giving you a glass of wine and setting you up with bikes and a map of all of the locations you can go to. The odd thing about getting that starting glass of wine is that it is only 1030 in the morning, but we all managed. We got on and headed out the furthest location first, this doubled as a benefit as it worked off our hangovers from the previous night. The wine tours were very interesting as we got toured through the entire wine making process. We made it to a variety of different wine places, some that make the wines old fasioned, some high tech, some in large quantities and some in small. We learned how to properly judge wine but the colour, smell, alcohol content and taste. One
of my favorite stops on the tour was actually not a winery at all but a chocolate and liqours place. I tried the real absynth and have to admit I never want to try that stuff again. I´m happy to report that there were no real bike accidents during this whole tour!
That night immediately after getting back to the hostel we had to leave to get on a bus to Buenos Aires. This is a 14 hour bus ride. We decided that we´d splurge and take a first class bus. This has seats on it that are similar to the pods on the planes. The seats lie completely down. You even get served wine on the bus. After this trip we are going to have a hard time traveling on any other type of bus. We were only in Buenos Aires for one day so we took ourselves on a self guided walking tour. We got in some shopping, saw a lot of statues and chilled out in a park. Buenos Aires is a very neat looking city and we wouldn´t have minded staying longer but we were all dying to get to the beach.
That being
said we hopped on a bus down to Villa Gessel. This is a small beach town about 6 hours south of Buenos Aires. This town was exactly what we were looking for. We all had enough of big cities and were dying for a sleepy little town and that´s exactly what we got. This place had a gorgeous beach that was perfect for body surfing. Not very many tourists from outside of Argentina come here and everyone assumes we can speak spanish. We spent a couple of days just taking in the sun and eating some more steaks!
After we decided that we wanted to go horse back riding on the sand dunes and the beaches. The horses that we got were being trained for long distance racing so they all loved to run and run fast! Which I thought was absolutely perfect! It was fun to ride along the waterfront and the ocean breeze in our air. All of us came out with a very bruised bum, some with more pain then others 😊
New Years eve we decided to cook our own Asado (BBQ). Unfortunately....or fortunately...(depending on how you look at it) everyone else staying at
the hostel had the same idea. To compensate for the lack of room they through some metal on the ground and placed hot coals on it and added more grills. It was neat to cook with all of the Argentinans, attempt to communicate and expereince thier generosity. Just before midnight we all headed down to the beach. We brought in New years with thousands of other people standing on the beach as fire works were being lit off in every direction. It was an absolute perfect way to bring in the new year!
Tomorrow we head up to Puerto Iguazu. This is going to be a 28hour bus adventure. Thank-fully we have the first class seats again but i´m still not looking forward to it. I am going to get up early tomorrow to ensure I can get every last second of beach time. It would seem that the type of traveling is now going to shift away from the casual party travel to the adventure travel as we head to Iguazu falls, the Pantanal (brazil) and then into Bolivia. We will keep you posted with our adventures!
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Kristina
non-member comment
ohhhhhhh fantasmical!!!