Carollo Mendoza

23rd - 26th September 2009:

Didnīt sleep much on the bus which is unusual, normally they are fairly comfortable, girl behind me gassing on her mobile all night didnīt help. The bus station was hectic, for the first time in South America we were bombarded by accommodation touts trying to coax us into their hostels. We already had a place in mind so side stepped that lot and found the Hostelling Internation (HI) guy and managed to score a good deal for a few ...

One of the things you definitely have to do when you are in Mendoza is visiting a few wineries by bicycle. It is a must do! The easiest way to get a tour like that is to book one directly with an agency, as I did it as well, because you don't have to organize neither how to get the bikes or how to get around, nor which wineries you can visit.

I chose Kahuak Aventura (www.kahuak.com.ar, Mendoza) and was really happy with them. Although two friends of mine and ...

Our final stop, save the trip to Santiago for the flight to LA and home, is Mendoza - the wine region of Argentina.
To be honest, it has been a bit of a dissapointment. We have heard so many people rave about the place and so many guide books etc have said you should spend time here, but we think we must have missed something. Maybe it is because it is winter and there is no greenery, maybe it is because we have spent the last 12 months ...

... really thought that I would see The Andes. It seems miraculously exotic--almost as far from home as I can get. I know...that's not true--there are many further places and more exotic ones, too. Still. Mendoza is a nice, medium-sized city. I have, I believe, seen its charms during the four hour walk that I just completed. That's fine--I want to get out of the city, and will do that ASAP. It's a new city, having been damaged in ...

... as this was the longest we would be apart since we reunited with each other while traveling in November! However, it was kind of good timing as both of us had a lot of things to think about with regards to the future and sometimes I need to be on my own in order to really reflect and process my thoughts. We enjoyed a nice middle eastern meal in Mendoza for our last night and a phenomenal conversation on our views on the death penalty ...

... city is somewhat unnatural, built in the desert and sustained only by Andean water, but the park is in places just a mess of precast concrete ponds and constructed scenery and, well, you just feel that they could have done a nicer job on the whole thing. Aaaaanyway, critiquing public parks aside, the main reason I came to Mendoza was to sample the vino for which the region is so famous, and we eventually got around to it when we did a 'bike ...

... Not the greatest way to spend 6hrs! It was quite scary as the ferry (as in a old large container ship) crashed against the waves very heavily on the way back- people were seasick and quite frightened. The next day we made up for it by taxiing to a colony nearby. As a town Punta Areas was quite nice, but we did manage to get ripped off- a bar offering 2 for 1 drinks actually demanded that the same person drink the 2 drinks....a unique interpretation! We flew up ...

... double so for Ben and Natalia who are vegetarians. We then set out to do some wine tasting in the highly touted Maipu wine district.

You may remember our post from Provence which went into (perhaps too much) detail on the wine tourism infrastructure of various worldwide regions which is always interesting coming from an area where we take it for granted that almost every winery has a tasting room - usually ...

Two days of wine tasting, one diy with a bike thrown in, the other transported between bodegas with a guide in an airconditioned minibus - both very different, but excellent fun. We got to try different malbec vintages, oaked, unoaked, tempranillo, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc - we did our best to work our way through as much as we ...

... to be a sweaty mess around here so accept and even better, embrace it on a bycycle and you will have a whale of a time. We head to Mr Hugo to rent bikes for the day about 11am - he is the vendor of choice as he likes to join the cyclists for a tipple after their tours. The tour we do (not a tour really, just us following a standard circuit around some of the local vineyards) is a classic example of how you meet people ...