Blogs from Uspallata, Mendoza, Argentina, South America

We spent Saturday morning on the streets outside our hostel at the second parade for the Festival of the Wines. This parade was quite different from the on Friday night that featured the queens of the various districts from the state of Mendoza. Instead, Saturday's parade was more on foot and featured various social and political movements, marching bands in wild costumes, gauchos, and, of course, queens from the region and various other festivals. At times it was hard to tell what was the parade and what was not. There was no real control of anyone, the crowd often squeezing the street closed along with the vendors of everything from tiaras, sandwiches, balloons, cotton candy and empanadas. But when a band or group appeared the throngs pulled back to enjoy yet another band, political group singing ... read more

Hello Party People, We woke up early as Vick wanted to wash her hair, if she had done it the night before she would have got a bad neck?? (Women, Vick said she didn’t have a hairdryer, so all you women will understand). Also we wanted to cook a pasta salad for the BBQ, Sergio, (our couch surfing host in Chile) wanted to have one today in the mountains, which sounded quite cool. Once we got downstairs and on the Wi-Fi our terrible day started. Sergio said he was going to be at our hostel at 10:00, however we had a message on whatsapp saying that he couldn’t get through the border until later in the day, so he would let us know what time he would be here. We carried on and cooked up the ... read more

Esta fue mi primera excursión del viaje. Acabábamos de llegar a Uspallata (1900msnm) desde Uruguay y decidimos hacer una excursión de aclimatación a la altura y a la bicicleta. La excursión nos servía como aclimatación pero también para pasar dos días y poder ver así el Rally Dakar, que empezaba etapa desde Uspallata el día 7 de enero. En el hostal en el que nos alojabamos nos recomendaron esta ruta hasta el PN El Leoncito, donde hay una laguna seca en medio de un valle desértico y debía de generar un paisaje bastante bonito con los Andes de fondo. Ahí nos dijeron que había un camping donde poder acampar así que el plan cuadraba bastante bien. La Pampa del Leoncito, como llaman en ... read more

We have made it out of Chile into Argentina and head back to Chile in the Morning. We are actually in Los Flores tonight, but there was no Los Flores for the blog entry so we are not now in Uspillata. Blog so far.... Wow what a start to the adventure, with wayward adventurers at the Airport going directly through Immigration, instead of regrouping with the lady's that had come to farewell us over a cup of coffee upstairs and group photo, sorry lady's, but they must of had Adventure on their minds...... Anyway we all made it to Santiago, with Scratch scoring a free upgrade to Business class as a Birthday treat. We got directly onto the paperwork as soon as we landed and we had the motos the next day. On the way from ... read more

Hola Amigos! So, we spent several days in Mendoza and now are back in the big city. Buenos Aires feels like home after all that travel! In Mendoza, we spent one entire day doing a "wine and bikes" tour, where we rented bikes and rode around checking out various wineries, olive oil factories, a vodka factory, and chocolate and liquor factory. It was a beautiful, sunny day... perfect for relaxing out in the vineyards with some wine (or vodka...). And unlike wine tours in the states, here they give pretty extensive tours of the vineyards and factories, so we learned lots about wine making too. We also spent a day traveling to Uspallata, a small town a couple hours from Mendoza and from there travelled a couple more hours to the even smaller town of Puente ... read more