These were but a few of the topics discussed round a shabby garden table sat outside our hostel in Mendoza. But then as many of you know that's what happens when Greg and I have 6 bottles of Mendoza's not so finest plus 2 litres of it's home lager. The plan as usual didn't go to plan. It was to make a healthy tuna salad and get to bed by 8. Ok that sounds unrealistic but it is pretty wise after a double epic bus journey, no sleep, a diet of crisps and biscuits and plans to do a wine tasting bike tour the following day. The fatal downfall was the 2 litres of beer to help this rather boring plan go down a bit smoother. Well that, and a 31 year old ozzy teacher trying to sleep his way around south America and a 50 year old American couple who generally hated other Americans, oh and the ozzy's friend who flew in half way through the night from the Antarctic where he'd been swimming the freezing seas. Needless to say we got to bed at 6am and slept through what should have been our wine tasting! As you can see from my brief description of our fellow wine hounds it was an interesting night.
Nevermind, plenty of time for more wine.
Reluctantly a day and a lot of feeling hungover later we swung our leg over another god damn bike. This time though the big seat and cute basket (Greg didn't get one) made it a bit more leisurely. Not to mention the flat roads, which was a good thing as Mendoza is a desert, it was about 35degrees so the sweat was dripping off us. Again things didn't go quite to plan as we had wanted to arrive mid morning so we could fit more tastings in, but what with the effort to get Greg out of bed on a 2 day hangover and getting in the wrong bus out to the wineries we arrived at 2pm in the wine area of Maipu. However 2 free glasses of wine later from our bike hire company we were ready to hit the road. We managed to get to 3 different wineries, each with it's own style and wine making process. After each tour we got to sample from several different bottles, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert and anyway we didn't pay to sample the best stuff but it was excellent and we had our favourites.
It was such a fun day biking between them then sitting on their porches sipping from several large glasses, looking out over vineyards with snow topped mountains on the horizon. Not a bad way to spend a Friday.
Obviously the more you drink the the more it all tastes the same, so when it came to drop the bikes off at 6 we welcomed the free flowing top ups till 9! We met a couple of kiwi's enjoying the same experience and went back to Mendoza with them for a few more drinks once we'd drunk the free wine dry.
Mendoza is ok as far as Argentinian cities go, but we've had enough of big cities so we stayed in the confines of our hostel for the next few days, detoxing and catching up on tv. Mendoza is sooo hot so it's just not work walking round till the sun has gone down, you can sort of forgive them for having really long siestas although it's annoying when you want an ice-cream.
The wine tasting was the last activity on the list for south America, well until we return next time with more money anyway. So our focus has turned to NZ. So we feel now in a strange limbo, feeling sad that the South America adventure is over but so excited about NZ, specifically our own little campervan and also being in an English speaking country where there is normal food. Don't get me wrong I've loved the challenge of trying to pick up some Spanish to be able to communicate with the locals, but sometimes it gets frustrating especially when they pull a fast one cause they know you can't speak the language. My biggest regret is not learning it before we came. We've picked up quite a bit though especially from watching films on the buses with English subtitles.
So our last stop is Santiago, but we thought we should try and get a bit if beach inbetween so we headed back over the boarder to Vina del Mar a couple of hours north of Santiago on the pacific....
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