Mendoza

The 17 hour bus ride to Mendoza was less than pleasant, because we are bad at making plans and always booking at the last minute, not only did we miss out on the good seats but we were also right down the end of the bus. Although the scenery was beautiful, we quickly got back into scrubby desert landscapes with a bright blue river and towering rock formations.

We arrived at Mendoza at 7am and were surprised to find it was summer, one day of summer and we were cursing our decision to pack so many winter clothes, despite wearing all of them just a few days before. The city of Mendoza is fairly small, at least the inner city is and despite being in the middle of a desert has beautiful wide tree lined streets, watered with small open canals. After a quick nap at our cheap but grimy hostel we headed out to do the walking tour which was great. It was a nice small group and I felt like we learned a lot, with a totally different perspective of parts of Argentinean history form the walking tours in BA.

In the afternoon we attempted to walk up small hill in the city's park but between James's knee and the heat we quickly gave up and embraced siesta time instead. We got up at sunset and went to watch it from the top floor of a fancy hotel while drinking red wine, since it would be rude not too.

The next day we had booked in for what I had come to Mendoza for, drinking wine and riding bikes. The winery tour by bicycle that we went on caters to the backpacking crowd so we were picked up in a minibus and driven to our first winery. It was an organic, family owned, small winery and it was really cool, very rustic and Instagram photo ready. As it was right at the end of the harvest there wasn't a lot going on but we were split into two groups to take a tour anyway, English and Spanish. Our group was made up of James and I and a woman from Holland who also insisted her Columbian boyfriend join our group, and then at the next winery a German woman gave up her attempts at Spanish and joined our fun little group. We tried 4 different wines at the fist place and were shown how to look like snobs and swirl our wine around before commenting on the smells and tastes. Which as we learned is completely up to the individual as it relies on what smells are triggered by memory, I guess my memory is only of wine. We were brought a spit bucket but instead we all opted to knock back the four tastings at 11.30 in the morning and

then wobble off on our bikes. We were lead to the next place which was much bigger and fancier although it was still considered boutique and it and produced 450 000 bottles a year and not up to 15 million like the big wineries. This was my least favourite winery which could have had something to do with its sterile, professional atmosphere or the fact they only gave us 2 tastings. Andres, the Columbian was so put out he drank the hosts glass as well when she wasn't looking. We set out on our bikes again and headed to a little beer garden for lunch to cleanse our palates with empanadas and craft beer. From here we were taken by bus again to the final winery. Which was a far more commercial place. We didn't get a tour but we had an amazing host who happily let us try the samples more than once. To celebrate reaching the end of the tour our group went in on the 2nd most expensive bottle of wine they had, a Reserve Malbec from 2016. It was still less than $5 per glass and it was delicious I could definitely turn into a wine snob.

We went home for another siesta before meeting up with our group again to go out for dinner, we compromised between Argentinean dinner time and European dinner time and met at 9pm. James celebrated our last night in Argentina with a steak of course, but it did come with salad and I was stoked that we'd found a restaurant with a lot of vegetarian options. I got a vege burger, which despite being a bit hipster and served on a roof tile was delicious.

At 1am we headed home for an early night by Argentinean standards to get ready to head to Chile.