Mendoza

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After a bit of a wait for the bus, we jumped on our overnight bus to Mendoza. Quite a uneventful journey, thankfully. We had a sdecent enough sleep due to the big comfy chairs and were woken in the morning when we stopped for breakfast of coffee and croissants in a small towns café.

We arrived in Mendoza about midday, settled into our hostel then had a wonder around the streets. Mendoza’s streets are big and lazy, sprawled out with wide lanes for the cars, big pavements and dipped down gutters with bridges running across them every so often. Luckily we stumbled across a local market where we had the chance to sample some local delicacies, like deep fried whitebait!

The next day was spent wondering around the biggest park we’ve ever seen. Massive expanses of green grass, with a full sized boating lake, a seemingly abandoned football stadium and a zoo which we ran out of energy before reaching! So we returned back to our hostel for a feed and a relax for the evening.

Up early the next day we headed out on a tour to the hot springs, it was a busy bus full of tourists and a warm and sunny day. We arrived to find them located in a gully, surrounded by mountains with a small creek at the bottom running around the side of the complex. The complex itself was mostly uncovered, with pools and spar’s of various sizes, shapes and temperature. Thankfully, they had some rapids and a few slides to keep me and Kjersti amused. Around lunchtime we dried ourselves off and headed to the local shop, for a bottle of stella and a sandwich, returning to the pools until the evening when our ride back dropped the two of us, wrinkled and half asleep back at our hostel.

We saved the best till last for our final day in Mendoza, navigating a few local bus which strangely only accepted coins when you had to pay, we finally made it. It was big far the biggest zoo we had ever seen, with massive amounts of animals. We spent hours wondering up hills with beautiful panoramic views of the city, down one-way paths to certain creature’s areas, through thick trees and bush to wild cages and out onto view points down into lakes or bear encloses. Unfortunately some of the cages were quite small and you could see some of the animals weren’t too happy which wasn’t nice to see but hopefully some one would give it the boost it needs to bring it back to its former glory. We were always very lucky to find a parrot sat on the gate outside waiting to have his photo taken with us.

After our photo shot we walked back through the town stopping to pick up some more whitebait and then onto our bus, bound for the Bariloche in the Lake district of Argentina!

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Photos

Mendoza
Out in the Cities park, very pretty!

Having a chill!
Out in the park

No patting Kjersti in the zoo
:(

Hippo!!
Just before the attack

Catcas Bob!
Mendoza Hot water springs!

The view from the springs
Not bad eh?