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Published: February 6th 2010
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J:
Today is the last day of our trip. In a few hours we will board a plane to New Zealand and our journeys in South America shall be over for now, so it seems an appropriate point to reflect on our last few stops. Fittingly for a celebration of our travels, they were all wine regions.
After Buenos Aires we stopped at Mendoza and checked into possibly the dirtiest hostel in Argentina, finding both cigarette ash and pubic hair on our bed sheets. Lovely.
Anyway, Mendoza is the wine capital of Argentina, with over 70% of the country's production coming from the region, and is one of the eight global premier wine regions. In the spirit of fully embracing the local culture we booked a bike tour around the vineyards for the following day and a bought a few bottles to sample that evening. Not wanting to spend any more time in our hostel than was absolutely necessary, we instead opted to drink our wine from plastic cups in the main Plaza. Standard adolescent behaviour, only with a vintage red instead of White Lightening now.
The wine tour involved a little cycling in the sun, plenty of vino tasting and a stop at a liquor brewery for Russian Death (a chili vodka drink) and absinthe in the afternoon. With such an itinerary, eight of the nine participants were, naturally, English. And since this was a cultural experience there was nothing technically wrong about commencing the day's drinking before 10am. One of the wineries we went to had a fine reputation and only sold bottles in person at the vineyard so we bought a bottle of extra special reserve Melbec, hand numbered and signed by the head vinier no less, to add to our now burgeoning wine collection (doubling it, in fact) for roughly the price of a bottle of house red in London.
The next day we left Argentina and moved on to Chile - the seventh and last country on our trip. The only non-English person on the Mendoza wine tour lived in Santiago and he offered some advice on what to do in the capital - "Leave. Go to the coast." With this ringing endorsement we made our way to Valparaíso, a Port on the western edge of the continent.
Valparaíso has a grand history and was a much more important city 100 years ago than it is now. It hosted the country's first library and the continent's first stock exchange. Though most of the greatness has gone the grandeur remains and a lot of the infrastructure, such as the cable car elevators, seems stuck in a bygone era. These cable cars lifts are basically garden sheds hauled up a near vertical slope by ageing, clunking machinery and do little to inspire confidence that you're not about to hurtle 100m down to the ground in a thin wooden box. The town loves them though, and they are the subject of street murials and graffiti alike.
Although we had been travelling for a while, we were still finding culinary surprises in Chile: 'Completos' - cold Frankfurters covered in sourkraut and cheese sauce were worth missing, Chile does wonderful sushi, and buying an empiñada from a dodgy bakery with swastika floor tiles next door to a horse butchers might not have been such a smart move in retrospect.
A couple of miles along the coastine is the beach resort of Viña del Mar. We spent a few afternoons here enjoying the sunshine and occasionally wandered into the sea. This was more risky than it might sound as the currents here create ferocious waves about 10 feet high. We waded into the thick of it and felt the sheer power in the tides. Just as I saw and laughed at a guy for getting swept back to the beach I was caught by a wave and tumbled back about 30 feet from where I was standing, now with sand in my face and a cruel sense of karma.
By this point we had met up with Alex and Hollaye, a couple of friends from London who were at the beginning of their trip through the continent. Whilst we were at the coast it was Hollaye's birthday so we toasted to that and to our last proper night out of the holiday. It has been a great venture but all things must end so we bode farewell to South America. Still, at least we have New Zealand to look forward to...
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