Valparaiso and Mendoza

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Hola Chicos!

11-13/02/10

From Santiago, visit Valparaiso for a few days. It´s a reasonably sizeable city built on a gradient with plenty of quaint housing and artistic graffitti. A lot of it is very pretty but there´s always an undercurrent of danger lurking. It´s very easy to stumble into dodgy looking areas where the locals stare at you and ask for money. But we survived. Didn´t get any real sleep the night before a 7am bus to Mendoza - the capital city of wine tours. Border crossing was a pain in the arse again. Had to wait over 2 hours just to have your passport stamped and bananas confiscated. Those renegade Chilean banana-planters in Argentina ruin it for the rest of us.

13-14/02/10

Clever-Cloggs Shrennie gets confused between what is a hostel and what is a restaurant on his map and ends up directing us to a restaurant to sleep for the night. Good as restaurants are, they do not offer these kind of night time services so we end up checking into a cheap but pretty grotty hostel called ´Wincas´. The morning shower is an experience. Right in the middle of maximum body lather (a pleasant thought) the shower inexplicably stopped working. For 10 minutes. Having weighed up my options I was about to finish the job in a nearby sink until fortunately it decided to start working again. We check into another hostel - ´Damajuana´- which is much nicer. It even has a lovely swimming pool.

15/02/10

Get on the bus early in the morning and head to ´Maipu´ to hire some bikes and commence a little wine tour. Immature that it is, I found it funny (and still find it slightly funny) when a German said ¨I spent 2 days in Maipu¨. That must have been a bit smelly. Anyway, hire some bikes from ´Mr Hugo´ (Adam and I tried to work a tandem but couldn´t balance it even when sober). Visit around 4-5 wineries (or ´Bodegas´as they are called in Spanish) for some wine tasting and end up cycling back to ´Mr Hugo´ swaying from side-to-side slightly more than at the beginning. A very pleasant sunny day and the clouds that had once threated to ruin proceedings never fully materialised. In the evening, Adam spills his beer all over my shorts. Mistake point.

16/02/10

Shren and I don´t do much today but Adam decides to redo the same wine tour as yesterday with a friend from Uni called Claire who lives in Mendoza. Hardcore. After watching Man U agonisingly beat Milan, we have our own barbeque in the evening and then head to a nearby bar. On arriving back to the hostel at 5am, we decide the pool is calling so take a cheeky late night/early morning dip.

17/02/10

Today we get a taxi to ´Bodega Ruca Marlen´ where we have a lavish 6-course meal with a glass of wine for each course. Absolutely delicious, and for what you get not too unreasonably priced either. This evening at 8pm we´re getting a 20 hour bus to Salta. We have booked ourselves onto the Argentinian equivalent of first class (called ´Cama´) and supposedly have glasses of Champagne and fully reclinable beds to look forward to. That will certainly beat trying to sleep on an upright chair.

Ciao x

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