Hotel Milena Mendoza

... camping and natural hot springs. We drove into the dark out of the city but never found the place. We kept driving, now up into the mountains, into the cold and we started getting very cold and it was very dark. We needed a place to crash and we finally found a town, a very touristy town in the mountains west of Mendoza with cabins for rent and we built a fire, cooked up the steaks and crashed for the night...

... managed - we dont have that time as we fly to LA in a day or so. So a quick panic at the bus station, a refund of tickets, a dash to the airport and we have bought our flight ticket for this afternoon. Bit of a sod really as flights are not cheap (it was actually 100pounds cheaper to by a return ticket than one way! So if anyone out there needs a Santiago to Mendoza ticket for next week we have a couple spare...) but, hopefully, all´s well that ends well.

... really wasn't anything so unusual about a day like today--if I was in Oregon. I do this stuff (mostly) whenever I want. I had the "tourist sampler"--a nice, safe excursion to experience the outdoors. But it was 7000 miles from home, and the sun shone, and the mountains (even the foothills) were big, the trees mostly very different, and there were Condor nests to see. So it couldn't help but be pretty cool. As I said, I was ...

... I´d sooner go and buy a bottle of wine (extortionately priced at a whole 3 pounds) and drink it in the comfort of my hostel garden. It certainly beats cycling for hours up hill, spending 20 minutes ´tasting´ (sipping actually) a meagre serving of wine and then being hurded back onto the bikes to rush on to the next destination.

When the group half walked half limped back into the hostel with severe saddle-****, I knew I had made the right decision.....

L

... what I like to call... The MendoZONE Diet. The MendoZONE Diet: 1. wake up at 6am every morning.. and begin your day with an apple, 4 cups of coffee, and some sort of granola bar. 2. Proceed to work for 6 hours of physical labour. 3. Lunch: 1 or 2 Salami sandwiches with cheese on calabrese panini, some sort of salad pasta or bean. Followed by some sort of fruit or cookie covered in Dulce de Leche (like carmel but with ...

... bed-bug bites on his face, arms and hands. Although I managed to avoid the physical trauma of their bites; I have however been psychologically wounded and I scratch my non-existent bites when thinking of them. Nasty little critters those bed-bugs. Due to a drug-related incident earlier in the week, the border crossing during the bus ride from Mendoza to Santiago took over three hours and every bag on every bus was thoroughly searched. Arriving in the dark in Santiago ...

... pasta and walked up an amazing street full of bars and clubs and restaurants both sides of the street. Night life doesn't get started till about 12 and dinner isn't till at least 9 or ten. Hard to get used to eating late, but we manage;) We meet some lovely people at the hostel - some pommies, lots of south americans tripping round during their uni hols and two aussie blokes from Brisbane.... small small ...

... after we inhaled our food to be there before 2pm. Always the way.

As usual there were a few more people to collect from other hotels and then we headed into wine country! Woo-hoo!

The deal with this tour was that we'd be going to one new bodega, an olive oil factory/farm, then an ...

... in Rome... ;)

We had a nice chill-out and then wandered off to find another hostel or hotel to move into for the next couple of nights. All of the nice backpacker hostels were fully booked, so we walked into town and looked at a few cheap hotels.

The first one we tried had a decent double room for slightly more than we paid last night, so rather than fanny around looking at loads more we put down a deposit for tomorrow.

We ...