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Published: April 8th 2009
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Well I have now drunk my first full glass of red wine!! And having done it in Argentina’s wine capital i think I’ve been pretty spoilt. Steve and I headed from Iguauzu after ‘the falls’ to the middle of Argentina and a city called Mendoza (this was after 2 nights on a bus and 8 hours wondering round a city called Cordoba in between the buses!!). The main reason we came here was the try and educate ourselves in red wine, and mostly to go on the ‘bikes and wine’ tour we’d been looking forward to - a day pedalling round to all the wineries getting an education in wine tasting. The first day we just chilled out around the city and we booked a bus out to the town with all the vineyards - Maipu was its name - pronounced My Poo to our amusement. We got the bike place and chose our transport for the day - I naturally went for the vintage bike rather than the more practical mountain bike with gears and a spongy saddle (yeah i paid for the bad saddle for two days - but hey the bike was cute!). We were given a map
and with two Austrian girls and a guy from France we went off to the first winery. This also happened to be the biggest winery were they produce 10 million litres of wine a year!! We were able to try the grapes straight from the vine and you’ve never tasted anything like it - forget grapes from Tesco Finest - these were AMAZING! They were so sweet and juicy that your hands felt like you’d rubbed glue all over them there were so sticky!
The next part of the day was the toughest - we cycled to the furthest vineyard on the map so we could work our way back (sensible i hear you say) which was 12k away!! Um, not so great on my little vintage bike!! I battled on and we went to a smaller vineyard where we were able to wonder through the vines and pick our own grapes. We also had a tasting session of various Malbec wines (the grape of the region). Across the road was an olive oil farm - this was ok - not that impressive (we just wanted to try all the wines). We then cycled back to some other vineyards
which weren’t too far away - the first being a small, traditional one where we were able to try two glasses of wine for less than £3 which was great. Literally across the road was a modern winery with an lovely balcony overlooking the estate and we spent the rest of the afternoon there. We were very bad backpackers at the end of the day and none of us could bear the cycle back to the shop so we left our bikes at the winery and took the bus back to Mendoza - the owner of the winery said he’d call the company, but he was crazy so we weren’t sure he did!! We cooked ourselves a lot of steak on the BBQ that night and it was the end to a really good day!
We hung around Mendoza for another day, going to parks and just chilling and we then made our way to a place two hours west and further in to the Andes. Uspallata had been recommended by Jayde (thank you!) and it was stunning! The hostel was 5k out of the town so when the bus dropped us off we were literally in the middle
of nowhere surrounded by colourful mountains and blue sky!! Each place we seem to go looks totally different and that’s what I love about Argentina! Turns out there was only two other people in the hostel that night which was weird but the owner spoke really good English and was really nice. The hostel was set amongst the mountains and there was a creek just next to it so we went straight there with the hostel dogs and just took in the views! We then walked in to the town (5k away) with the company of one of the hostel dogs - he walked all the way with us!! The town was nothing more than a cross roads and we sat outside a cafe with all the memorabilia from Seven Years in Tibet for which the mountains we were looking at was the setting for the film!! Not Tibet!! If it’s good enough for Brad Pitt it’s good enough for us!!
The main reason we came here was to go horse riding in the amazing mountains so we booked a full day’s trek (my bum was feeling recovered enough to sit on a horse!). We headed out with our
gaucho and two local girls and went in to the mountains in hot sunshine and eventually stopped at the bottom of a mountain after a few hours. We started to walk up and after only a couple of steps were hit with the altitude - literally i could only walk about 60 metres before my heart started beating as if I’d been running full steam on a treadmill for 15 minutes - it was a very strange sensation. Turns out the mountain was 3200m above sea level so it was pretty high - one of the girls said it was tougher than the Inca trail which made me feel a lot better!! The other girl didn’t come the whole way but I battled on and the gaucho was really nice, stopping lots!! When we finally got to the top the view was incredible - full 360 degrees! We sat and ate lunch taking in the surroundings before we filled out a book hidden under a rock to leave for others that climbed up. One person had wrote that he had just proposed because it was so beautiful there (or maybe the altitude had overcome him??). The way down was fine
and our horses were waiting for us - mine decided on the way back to play up a lot though and obviously though I liked it to trot - perhaps mistaking ‘ow, ow, ow, OW’ for ‘good horse’- Steve didn’t help making his horse trot so mine would follow!! After 7 hours on the horse we were glad to get back to the hostel and watch the sun set over the mountains.
After an ‘Asado’ (Argentinean BBQ) cooked by the owner we headed to bed still feeling like we were on the horses and woke up to get the bus back to Mendoza. We chilled out around the city again as our bus left late in the evening - we were making our way to a place called Bariloche which is in Argentina’s Lake District at the top of Patagonia. I’m sitting writing this blog from our hostel which is in the penthouse of a 10 story building overlooking a lake - photo evidence in the next blog!!
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Wino
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slurp
bloody love it, keep up the good work, love to hear about wine and Iola's bottom, this is the best blog so far! :-) Tally Ho Binky!!