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Published: April 4th 2014
San Juan to Mendoza.
Leaving San Juan and heading South towards Mendoza, we stopped about 75 kms down the road for a coffee break, with D Duke and D Nurse scoring a huge bunch of grapes off a transport truck loaded with them on his way to a winery....then D Nurse was presented with a huge melon off the 'Melon truck'. That was all great but where do you put that when you are riding a Ducati??
About now, Mary comes to the rescue and it somehow disappeared inside a compartment in the Spyder.
We took a diversion to go up to Villavacencia, as a couple of years ago, there was a bakery there and they also made good coffee. The road into the National Park is concrete most of the way and every joint is a bump - by the time we got there to find it now no longer exists, Mary had dumped her breakfast on the side of the road and was not happy up in this altitude and the bumpy roads, so made her way back, but not before we rescued the melon from her. Here we divided up the melon and shared it
"But this is MY Melon!!"
"You had better give me a piece, or else!!"amongst us, even with an Argentinean fellow traveller and his wife.
The run back down the hill and onto Mendoza, was uneventful, except that D Duke somehow went on his own tour, eventually arriving at our hotel, minus Gerardo, who was still back in Las Haras looking for him, nothing that a few beers didn't solve....
Mendoza is a shopping Mecca, with many Chileans making a long weekend and coming over the border on Friday for the weekend to shop, there must be literally hundreds of shoe shops here alone, then all the clothing shops for both men and women. The shopping and down town area of Mendoza is well presented and all the streets are shaded by huge poplar trees.
The first and last time I stayed in Mendoza was in January 2005 and coupled with the heat and thick diesel fumes being belched out into the streets by the hundreds of buses pounding the city streets, all I wanted to do was get out of the place. Well, there have been a lot of changes in this city since then, and the main one has been to replace all the buses (I think they have
sent them to Bolivia!)
We were to spend two nights here and take in the cultural and winery scene, well some of us stayed for three nights and really enjoyed the city. We went to Lopez Winery for lunch on our last day and we were in for a treat, this will now become part of our next Tarmac Tour.
Tomorrow we leave Argentina and head into Chile via the Paso Redentor, so haste pronto for my last blog. un abrazo, Rosco
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