Well we arrived in Mendoza to snow and sub'zero temperatures!! Snow in the city of Mendoza is quite rare, what is even more rare is the snow they experienced in Bs As today (first time sine 1918). We spent Sunday just looking around the city, it was completely deserted as it was a bank holiday weekend (it was Argentina's independance day on Monday). It was unbelievably cold, it didn't get above -5oC all day.

Mendoza is a lovely city, full of plazas. It was nice to have the place to ourselves. We gorged ourselves on 2 huge pieces of cake (lemon merengue pie and chocolate cake filled with dulce de leche) and coffee to warm ourselves up after the cold.

On Monday we took a bus trip to see the Bodegas (wineries and vineyards). We went to 3 different wineries and tasted some very fine argentinian wine - a little tip, apparently a 2002 Argentinian Malbec is absolutely superb!! It was incredibly interesting to see the different production methods used - from Lopez, one of Argentina's biggest producers using massive stinless stell vats before ageing in massive (50,000 bottle) french oak casks, to a small family-run business where all the corking and labelling is stil done by hand!

We were also taken to an olive grove - did you know there are more than 200 varieties of olive in the world!! The olives we ate were beautiful and so was the oil we tried with bread, even Sarah was enjoying eating them! Feeling suitably tipsy with a bottle of wine in tow we returned home, for a good nights sleep before our 'high mountain tour' tomorrow.

Night night, A&S xxx