Mendoza!

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Hola!

I am currently in El Bolsón, so have a good few weeks to catch up on! I think I left off at Salta and me not respecting the artefacts there. So I will continue from Mendoza where I was much more cultured (or not...!).

For anyone that is thinking about heading to Argentina and Mendoza, you have to stay in Hostel Lao. It is by far my favourite hostel I have been to. I spent most of my week there lying in a hammock by the pool. If I wasn´t in a hammock, I was lying on the sofa watching a film. I spent pretty much a week being horizontal in Mendoza!

Apart from the first day, which was spent doing a cycling tour of local wineries. Sounds like a bad combination? It really was, in terms of road safety. In terms of fun, it was a great combination! There was a group of 7 of us from the hostel, so we negotiated a discount with Mr Hugo (the bike hire guy), who by the way, is a legend. When we dropped the bikes off, he plied us with free wine! We spent 2 hours just drinking at the bike hire place! I don´t really need to go into details about the day, but it was so much fun, cycling from one winery to the next, eventually ending up at the one furthest away and realising we had to power-pedal back a good few kilometres to get the bikes back in time!

And, to be honest, that was as adventurous as I got in Mendoza! I felt like I needed come chill-out time, so that is exactly what I did. I met a really great group of people in that hostel, which made for an excellent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Christmas Eve in itself was an adventure, to be honest! We booked a Christmas Dinner (everyone has their main meal on Christmas Eve in Argentina) at a local restaurant, and keeping to Argentine tradition, I went for a steak. It was the size of my head. You may have seen the photos on Facebook! Not one to give up easily, I tackled it with integrity, but the steak defeated me! After dinner, we headed to a bar and had what tasted like a strawberry alcoholic Angel Delight cocktail. There was a big party going on in the main park in Mendoza, so after the weird strawberry drink, we tried to get there. We followed the sound of music (it was a small music festival outside) but this park is bloody massive! And we ended up at a road lined with cars and Argentinian teenagers hanging out in their cars with music blasting, not at the party. So 2 girls who spoke a decent amount of Spanish asked a police officer we found where to go. And managed to wangle us a ride in a police van to the entrance of the park party! Amazing! And we had a great time dancing and drinking until about 8am! After that, there were no taxis running on Christmas Day, so we walked for an hour and a half to get back to the hostel, hungover, tired, but happy!

So, my Christmas Day was very eventful. I slept, moved to a hammock, slept, and only got up in time for the Christmas BBQ that night!

And from Mendoza, I headed to Bariloche, which will follow in a few days....

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Comments

[Komal Verma]

Happy new year
Sounds fab kat!! keep living it up xoxo