Red wine & Steak!

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Our bus from Chile took us to Mendoza, wine region of Argentina. We stayed at Hostel Laos, an excellent hostel with extremely helpful and friendly staff on reception. Throughout our travels we keep meaning to write reviews on hostels we have stayed at because we always rely on them from other people, but we've never got round to it. So when we remember a good one we try to mention it in the blog in case people find it through google.

The hostel organised a bikes and wine tour for us, and so the next day we followed our map and cycled from vineyard to vineyard getting merrier by the tasting. Mendoza is famous for malbec and so we decided to buy a bottle and keep it as a souvenir, and Ash has carried it around ever since. At our last vineyard we met an american couple whom we got on well with and ended up back at their swish hotel for more free wine tasting. The brilliant day ended with us drunkenly trying to work out how to get the bus back to our hostel in the early ours of the morning.Lots of red wine but no steak yet. Next stop Buenos Aires.

We stayed in BA for about 5 days and crammed loads into those days. On our first night we went to a famous steak house and had the best and biggest steak and chips ever. We spent the next few days exploring the city; Recoletta cemetery where Evita is buried, San Telmo antiques market and free tango shows.

On the Sunday we went to River Plate stadium and watched a match between River Plate and San Lorenzo. The goal keeper was horrendous and subsequently River Plate has been all over the national news with relegation troubles for the first time in years! Although the atmosphere was incredible the standard of football was bad according to Tom. As well as watching a game, Tom went to a local pitch and had an international 5 a side game, with a mix of Argentinian and gringo lads. He had been gasping for a game of football since we left in January, and was chuffed when his team were runners up.

We had a weird coincidence at the hostel where we were staying. In our dorm room there was a Scottish couple who we found out were linked closely to one of Ash's good friends. We ended our time in BA having another steak dinner with them, a fitting end to a great few days in one of South Americas best cities.

BA runs on a different time to anywhere else, you eat dinner at 10pm earliest and the clubs don't even open until 2am, it was a great change getting into BA time and if we'd had the time (and energy) we would have stayed alot longer.

As we were so close to Uruguay we decided to get the ferry across from BA, we were looking forward to it as the Lonely Planet gave Uruguay and particularly Montevideo a great write up.

Lots of love T & Axx

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