♥ biking, wine tours + asado

Oh Cafayete! What can we say? The asado´s were delicious, the wine was divine and the people were welcoming. The only unfortunate thing was that this was the point where our "family" had gone separate ways so were by ourselves again. Luckily, we still had one member with us.

On the first day, we were greeted by the friendly family who owned the hostel. Little did we know, there are a lot more things to do in Cafayete than we thought. After being overwhelmed with the list the hostel had given us, we decided to look things over while eating emapanadas. The empañadas were delicious! We were accustomed to only 2 types of empañadas and they offered 12 different types here! Let´s just say we got super excited and stuffed ourselves. Little need to say, we still had room for dessert so we headed to the heladeria. yummm... wine ice cream! It pretty much tastes how you think it would. We finally decided to rent bikes for the rest of the day to visit a winery and goat cheese farm. So next stop... Etchart Bodega! After watching a dvd about wine in spanish (which we fully understood........), we finally got to taste the wine. They were quite generous with their portions so it was a long bike ride to the goat cheese farm. The long bike ride was enjoyable though as we rode across a few bodegas which were surrounded by mountains. The view was incredible! The goat cheese farm was interesting. Again, the tour was in Spanish but luckily Cat (fam member) was there to translate a few things for us since she understands a fair amount of Spanish. Later, we biked around Cafayete and went back to the hostel to have the wine and cheese we had bought. We were quite full from all the cheese but we had heard so much about their asados (bbq) so we just had to try it. Plus, we didn´t have our daily dose of Argentinian beef that day. So we decided to do it like the Argentinians and eat dinner at 10pm. So next thing you know, we´re standing next to the grill claiming our meat. To sum up, it was a highlight of the trip.

The next day, we decided to visit the waterfalls in Cafayete. I can´t stress how unprepared we were! As we were walking out of our hostel in our flip flops and skirts/shorts, the owners took a glance at us and told us we had to change into shoes and pants. We took a taxi to the entrance but we still had to go along a ¨path¨ to see the waterfalls which apparently is only supposed to take an hour. We were advised that you could hire guides at the drop off point however, there were no guides available when we arrived. So what was supposed to be a half day trip turned into a full day trip. There actually wasn´t a path to walk on as we thought... you have to climb rocks and cross the river back and forth. Eventually, we were at a point where we couldn´t figure how to get further. We were about to give up and turn around until another guide had spotted us and took us under his wing. haha. He took us to the waterfall, which was a lot smaller than we thought but the adventure itself was worth it. After we got back to the city, we were exhausted! We decided to just buy some wine, fruit and cheese for dinner. As we were having dinner, the most bizzare thing happened! David (a family member we parted with) entered the hostel. As usual, we had dinner ready for him and we had a little family reunion. As we were getting ready to turn in, we met one of the owner´s friend/cousin who was hanging out at the hostel. I played some ping pong with him... (failed at that) and we ended up having beers at the hostel. They tried persuading us to go out but we had an early bus ride at 6am. But... eventually we were convinced and we ended up staying out till 4am. They play salsa music at the bars and clubs here, so they tried to teach us how to salsa but I have to say that was another failure on my part. It was definitely a memorable night and well worth staying up for. Needless to say, we were able to get plenty of sleep on the long bus ride to Mendoza.

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Part of trip: Adventures of Lydia + Myra

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