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Published: July 12th 2011
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Caro; We arrived in Mendoza in the afternoon. The bus journeys had been fine so far in South America and unlike SE Asia the buses seem pretty reliable. This will likely change as we head into Bolivia and Peru but for now we have been pleasantly surprised. We had chosen the hostel because it was cheap and it said "Free wine" on the website. We are very easily pleased granted but when we arrived the chap on the desk was extremely helpful and our room was clean and cosey.
I had expected all of the men in Argentina to look like Maradonna, I was in fact correct, they all look like a younger or older version of the infamous "God" with the magic hand. Fortunately, not that many men look like Carlos Tevez, he has that unique look all to himself. Joff said that he expected the ladies to be hotter, I guess not all women in South America look like Shakira?! The tracksuit is a common piece of clothing in Argentina and specifically the shell suit usually worn with a mullet! I will say no more on the matter.
We set out to explore the town on foot
and saw that there were some demonstrations, this was a knock on effect from the riots which were taking place in Buenos Aries as a result of the football team Riverplate being relegated. We avoided that side of town and headed home for the introduction to "Mate" pronounced "maaate". We had not heard of Mate before but it is a traditional tea which is drunk by people from Argentina. Now we have been introduced to it we see people everywhere drinking it. I think that the intro session could have easily taken about 10 mins but the guy was quite in-depth and we were there for a good hour. Our reason for signing up had been to meet other people, in reality it was just me Joff and the guy giving the presentation who was really far too excited about a drink without alcohol! We had our free glass of wine afterwards and then headed into town for dinner. We stumbled upon a BBQ restaurant, you could load up your plate with salad and then you asked for the meat that you wanted to go with it. We washed this down with a nice glass of Malbec. Steak and Malbec
is such a good combination, Argentina was certainly going to be good for food! The guy in the restaurant seemed highly amused at our efforts and gave us an imprompute lesson in a cuts of meet in Spanish, which meant we got what we were after and not bulls balls! We will be eternally grateful to him!!
In the morning we set off to do a wine tour on bikes. The trip is fast becoming a world wine tour and personally I wouldn´t have it any other way! We got off the bus and bumped into a guy from Barnsley who works at the bike shop, he is married to a local lady and moved out to Argentina a few years ago. He got us organised with the bikes and we set off to explore the countryside around. The area is not as pretty as Malborough for example but the weather was beautiful and we were soon working up a thirst! That said the back drop of the Andes is always stunning regardless of what is in front of it! We went to Museo first of all but they just gave us half a glass and no introduction so
we promptly moved on having drunk our wine. At the next stop we tried some liqueurs, chocolate and bread with olive pastes and spreads which were delicious. We then went to the beer garden, it was here that we picked up a few friends. The beer garden had an offer, so we had a snack and some beer and as we were leaving a couple of stray dogs started to follow us, we weren´t too sure whether they belonged to the lady who owned the beer garden or not. They followed us for miles and seemed to think that it was great fun running alongside the bikes. They caused havoc with some of the other dogs in the neighbourhood and one of them almost got run over. Again people were looking at us to see why we were not controlling our dogs! I do hope that if they did belong to the beer garden lady that they returned safely!
We then took a change of tact having been caught out in Malborough and headed to the furthest away point so that we wouldn´t be cycling back in the dark. We enjoyed some lovely reds at Bodega Carinae and then
headed to La Familia Tomasso where we had a quick tasting followed by lunch. We ended the day at Bodgea Tempus Alba (which was more akin to a Napa style vineyard) trying all their wine list and then went back to drop the bikes off. We managed to even have a glass of vino before we took the bus back to Mendoza having tried a lot of delicious wines during the day. We had a quiet night in after all the drinking and cycling and watched the equivalent of "So you think you can dance¨Argentinian style.
The next day we took another death taxi to the train station and then caught the bus to St. Luis which was just 4 hours away. We made it there and were able to find the only hostel which is in the Lonely Planet but when the lady showed us 2 grotty dorms, we asked where we could get a room together?! We found a hotel close by and checked in. Of all places the hotel Belgrano! Looking in the guest book we were the only Brits to have ever stayed there. Not the greatest place but by no means the worst! We then headed out to dinner and stopped in the main square for a quick beer before we went to a restaurant close by. We had started to get a better grasp of spanish at this point so we could order food, we still have a long way to go though!! We had gone to St. Luis so that we could go to the National Park, unfortunately the lady thought we were completely mad when we said we wanted to go there. She pointed out that it was in fact winter and no trips run there as the weather is sub zero and the whole place is covered in snow which makes hiking somewhat challenging!! Words to that effect anyway! We spent most of the next day researching spanish classes and organising our onward travel to BA. Having killed most of the the day wandering round we headed to the bus terminal to catch the 12 hour night bus to Buenos Aires!
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