Mas vino por favor!!!

It took a couple of hours to get to the Andes proper but when we did it took around 5 hours to cross them. This is some mountain range. Such a humongously long and quite wide range of peaks with such a varied range of colours and rock formations. Some bits look like Uluru, others like New Zealand and a lot like I've never set my eyes on before.
We pass under snow covers by grey rivers, then red rivers (near where most of the red rock and earth was) following an abandoned railway line. Up in the mountains is the pretty good looking ski resort but the season has pretty much passed. It's supposed to be a very cheap place to try it too.
The border into Argentina is high up in the mountains and pretty cold, not surprisingly. Everyone's bags have to come off the bus and be x-rayed and everyone's hand luggage gets individually searched. Takes a bit of time but the Argentineans are friendly enough.
Bienvenidos a Argentina!
Coming down from the Andes into a small dusky village in the middle of no-where, Uspallata. This is where the Brad Pitt film 'Seven Years in Tibet' was shot. It didn't seem too appealing to me, although we'd been told otherwise.
Mendoza, however, sounded a lot more my kind of place. Wine is big business here, I'm sure we've been on a wine region tour around the world, not on purpose I may add. 70% of Argentina’s entire wine production is from the rolling hills and flat plains of Mendoza. Over 2000 wineries in total. Chances are if you've drunk Argentinean wine that you drunk from the grapes of Mendoza. I was never much of a fan before but the wine here is top notch. We'd heard good things about Argentinean food and wine and neither disappointed. Oh, and it's cheap. The supermarket's cheapest wine was about 50p, fairly palatable. We usually splashed out a bit and got a good one for one pound fifty. Malbec is the local grape of choice, tinto(red) if you're interested.
Mendoza itself is a beautiful sun drenched and friendly city. It's safe to stroll around anywhere here at any time and you don't get hassled. In fact it's fair to say that again I'm one of the only blond guys walking about the place but no-one cares. Partly because this must be the best looking city in the entire world. I've never seen soo many good looking people in one place in my life. It was obscene! No wonder they couldn't give two hoots about a blond Lancashire lad!
Every street is tree lined and fairly wide. An earthquake in 1861 flattened most of the city. The council decided to rebuild with wider avenues, for rubble to fall into, and include many open squares for people to evacuate into if another earthquake struck. It never did, but it did mean that the place is great to walk around. Lots of little Plazas in different styles, there's a Chile, Italy (in a Roman style with statues and fountains), España(with intricate tiling covering every surface) Plaza and so on, that all look great. It's much warmer than temperate Santiago too. I can't begin to think how many days it's been since we saw rain.
Ice cream seems big business here, on a Saturday night families and couples are seen scoffing large ice-creams upto 2am! I know because we could see them from our room.
There's also a pre-occupation with battered old cars here. Every other car is 1970's Renault or Fiat. It seems there's more status the more battered your car looks. I'm sure a few have been booted in the side to achieve the desired affect. They're also very very loud cars. The street below our window howls nightly with the loudest exhaust noises I've heard away from a race track.
We ate some of the greatest ever food here too. The meat, Argentineans being the biggest meat eaters in the world, is beyond good. They certainly know how to live very well here. Some of the funky restaurants and cafés make it feel very European. A woman we met from Sydney, whilst in New Zealand, said that she preferred travelling in Peru and Bolivia than in Argentina. Mainly because Bolivia was much cheaper and that Argentina felt like it could've been in Europe. That's exactly why Mendoza was so good I thought. Besides, like the American in the next room said to us, 'Just because a place is cheap it doesn't make it good. Bolivia is no Argentina that's for sure'.
This is where we also begin to encounter another type of traveller that didn't seem to exist in Oz or NZ. The kind of traveller that isn't happy unless they've hacked half of their leg off somewhere in the Amazon and needs to enter bugs to the wound to seal it. These guys are planks. They think if you're not going on a 4 day trek through the jungle then you've seen nothing. Bollocks. These are the same people who say they've been to England and have only seen London.
We lived it up in Argentina, there's no denying it. Great wine and amazing food every night. Sun shining everyday, beautiful streets, beautiful people, beautiful buildings and beautiful cars. I was in my element.
The only problem with the place I could find was the transport. We walk everywhere in most places and Mendoza was no different. Thing is when we did want to get a bus we couldn’t as you need the exact amount, in change. Change is a real problem. The supermarket near us had 4 coins, the rest notes. 4 coins! I mean come on! This also meant that every time you buy anything you are always asked if you've got 'cambio', or change to you and me. No-one has change, except for the bus companies who must have piles of it!
We could manage with this until the day we decide to go for a walk in the park. Parque San Martin is a sprawling 420,000 hectares. I'm not too great with hectares. In fact I've no idea how big a hectare is. So walking it sounded fine. It took 30minutes of walking in baking sunshine to get there. When we did get there we realised it must be quite big as there's proper roads inside, and no-one is walking. There are joggers though so we plod on for another 2 and a half hours on dusty path and being fried by the sun. This was a bad idea. Our main objective was to climb atop the hill on the park for views of the city. No chance. We couldn't find anything but dust tracks and roads. But then to show how big this place was we passed two Universities, a cycling velodrome, a football stadium, a science research facility and a zoo. We finally get to a campground and I test my Spanish in trying to find out where to get the bus to get out of here. Surprise, surprise you need the exact change. The campground shop had only one coin! The owner even rang a friend and he had no coins either! What a joke. Another hour or so of walking and we happen upon a bit of life and a waterfall, aswell as the obligatory smooching couples lying on top of each other on the grass. We walk back and write the whole thing off.
Totally knackered and after about 5 hours of walking in flip-flops my legs are black with dirt. We deserve some good food and drink. Thankfully, we're in the right place. An excellent buffet place with fresh pasta, made on request, gorgeous paella, various salads, quiches, ice creams, cakes, cheesecakes, pancakes with booze and ice cream and a meat counter. Now in Argentina they don’t have an average buffet. There’s a separate guy that looks after and gives out the meat. It’s a huge grill rammed with all kinds of stuff that I have no idea. I do recognise the large pig strung out across the top though! I have no idea what to ask for so I just tell him ‘Mi Español is no bueno’ and he lumps one of the biggest pieces of tastiest meat I’ve ever eaten. And cracking crackling! All the great food you could eat and a bottle of wine for about 6 pounds each. I love this place! I could barely move afterwards. It had a great atmosphere too as a live singer wandered through the masses and everyone knew the words, young and old clapping and cheering. We were the only Europeans in there but it was just brilliant. An American guy came over to us and said, ‘Isn’t this just the most bizarre place you’ve ever been?’. ‘Yes, it’s great!’, I beamed.
Our last day was spent checking out some cool art and a bit of history about the earthquake. The graffiti here is also really good and really brightens the place up. We sat watching skateboarders whilst eating ice-cream in the sunshine.
If Mendoza is this good, what’s Buenos Aires going to be like!?