I know I said I'd write everyday, but I've been really exhausted at the end of each day lately. All this traveling wears you down. I feel like we've been gone for six months already and we only left Buenos Aires a little over a week ago! We're in our fourth city/fourth hostel with 7+hours on a bus in between each, so it takes a toll after a while.
Anyways,
So we arrived in Mendoza Saturday morning after an 11 hour overnight bus ride from Cordoba. It wasn't so bad, I got as much sleep as was possible. We got to our hostel around 9:30 am and all we wanted was to shower and rest for a bit before walking around town. Well, it turned out that check-in was at 2pm and our room wasn't ready yet! They let us put our bags away and eat breakfast but then we still had about four hours to kill so we decided to start our tour of the city early. Mendoza was gorgeous, mountain views, fresh air, tree lined streets, cars stopping for pedestrians, store owners greeting you...a big difference from the big cities. It seemed to be full of tourists so I felt less embarrassed taking my camera out and taking pictures of everything. We walked to the center of town, Plaza Indepencia, which had a huge fountain, trees, live music, and stands selling hand crafted jewelry and art. Surrounding this square are four other Plazas each about two blocks away from the main Plaza. We visited them all, and then walked to a park near all the government buildings where we decided to sit on the grass and take a break. Our break turned into an hour nap in the park, and we woke up just in time to catch lunch before all the restaurants and shops close for the afternoon siesta. Finally after lunch it was time to check in so we headed back to the hostel to get situated. Later we went out for an early dinner, and by early I mean 7pm, we were the only people in the restaurant. We had our first bottle of wine in Mendoza at the restaurant. It's actually cheaper to by a bottle than two glasses. A bottle of Malbec (my favorite kind of wine, made only here in Argentina) costs about $10 US. After dinner, we went to have dessert at another restaurant that was on the top floor of the tallest building in Mendoza (10 stories) with a spectacular view of the city with the Andes mountains in the distance. We walked back to the hostel to find it full of people, foreign and local. Our hostel also had a restaurant/bar attached to it that was apparently a really popular place. We decided to go and hang out there for a bit and play Uno : ) hahaha real party girls!
We hit the sack soon after that, and even with all the partying going on our room was far away and quiet. It was actually the nicest hostel we'd stayed in. We had our own bathroom and our own balcony. There was even a pool in the backyard, not that anyone was gonna use it in this temperature....Lauren shook me awake the next morning to say that it was snowing! I didn't believe her so I groaned and then turned to go back to sleep. She then opened the balcony doors and a gust of wind hit my face, I turned over to see snow falling heavily outside! Our plans for biking to the wineries were immediately canceled. Really anything involving the outdoors was canceled because we brought nothing with us that was snow proof. We went to the restaurant next door for breakfast and sat by the fire along with all the other gringos in flip flops haha. The snow stopped later that day and we decided to call it an early night as we were set on touring the wineries weather it was snowing or not.
Thankfully, Monday morning the sun was gleaming through the windows : ) Our idea was that we would check-out that morning, leave our stuff at the hostel, take the 45 min. bus ride to the wineries, be back in town by 4 or 5 pm and get on the bus to Chile. Obviously, our plan didn't really work. We checked-out, got on the bus and arrived to the town of Maipu by noon. We rented bikes from the company Bikes&Wines, we're given a map and took off. A little shaky at first haha, I don't think I'd been on a bike in years and now here I was on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and about to start drinking before lunch....
Our guide told us to head to the wine museum first, have a tasting first and then go to the last winery on the map and work our way back, as it was easier. Lauren and me are also bad at conversions so we had no idea what 11km would mean. Soooo 7 miles later, we got to our first winery already complaining about it being a literal pain in the ass. After a mini tour, where we actually learned a lot about how they make the wine, what creates the different aromas/flavors, difference in time, etc... we had more tasting. At this point, we had an equivalent of two glasses and still had about five wineries to go haha and don't forget the 7 mile bike ride back. We stopped for lunch around 4pm at a huge winery and had the best meal we'd had in a looong time. We accompanied it with more wine, obviously, and realized it was getting late and decided we had time for one last winery. By this time we were back on the main road and it was full of traffic. We had semi's and bus's honking at us to get out of the road, until we had an actual police escort follow us all the way to the next winery. It was a little weird at first and Lauren was convinced we were going to get arrested for drinking and biking (being illegal in the US) and I was convinced they were just protecting us. I think it was pretty obvious we were tourists. The next winery was too expensive, so we chose to leave it and head to the next site on the map, a chocolate factory! Instead of heading all the way back to the main road, I decided to take a marked shortcut on the map. This shortcut, it turns out, wasn't paved and wasn't dirt either. It was literally huge rocks on the road, which slowed us down and required more exertion. When we finally got to a dirt side road, we had to stop a couple of times and walk the bikes haha then when we got back on them, Lauren was chased by guard dogs from a nearby property.
We reached the main road only to see the Bikes&Wines sign and figured they lied to us about this supposed chocolate factory we'd been looking forward to and called it a day. The guy at the tour place didn't understand how we missed it, neither did I...even though we took a side route, it was on the map! Oh well.....by the time we got back on the bus for Mendoza it was almost 7. There was no way we were getting to Chile that night, which was kind of a relief as we were almost dead from exhaustion. Thankfully, we were able to get our room back, and got into bed at around 9pm. The next morning, we'd head to Chile!
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