Our first bus ride in South America was only about 6 hours long, from Santiago acrss the border to Mendoza in Argentina. We drove up into the mountains with fantastic views, and we went right amongst the people skiing near the border. It took about an hour to get through the border, but as border crossings go it was straight-forward, and the guy who looked after us on the bus (kind of like an air steward) was very helpful.

We arrived in Mendoza and were obviously looking lost because a guy came and insisted on showing us where our hostel was. We were obviously quite suspicious, but it turned out he actually was just a nice man who wanted to help! You never can tell. After a walk into twn we had some food, booked a wine tasting tour and had an early night.

On Monday we slept until lunchtime (think the jetlag was catching up with us) and had a quick lunch before being picked up for our half-day vineyard tour. The tour was really good, we visited two vineyards and did wine tastings, as well as an olive oil making place and a place which made chocolate and liqueurs. My only problem was that the bus through the mountains the day before had once again left me with only partial hearing, so I had to look like a right keeno, up at the front of the group to try and hear what the guide was saying. At one point Ben commented on the background music and I was like "Is there music playing"? Lol.

That evening we headed for dinner with some of the people we met on the trip, four English, five American and two Dutch, then went to the only place we could find that looked half busy...the good old Irish pub. It was a great night and Ben discovered that one of the English guys, Dave, would be doing the same course as Ben in September. Small world. We didn´t get back to the hostel until 5am, mainly because we got lost trying to find the right side of the Plaza to walk down and must have walked round it three times as far as we needed to. Oops.

As you can imagine Tuesday morning was spent sleeping, and the rest of the day was spent sitting in the sun in the plaza and going on the internet. That evening we went out again with some of the people from the night before, and once again ended up playing drinking games in the Irish pub. Home by 2am though, so somewhat of an improvement.

On Wednesday we had an evening bus to Buenos Aires, so had to get up reasonably early to check out. We then walked to San Martin Parque and strolled round by the lake, sat in the sun etc. Our bus was at about 7pm, and lasted about 16 hours. However, buses in Argentina are pretty legendary (we´d been hearing about them since Asia) as you get different classes of seat like on an aeroplane. We bought semi-cama tickets meaning the seat reclined but not completely. We were served drinks, a meal, played bingo, watched films and had pretty nice comfy seats, better than on an aeroplane. A pretty nice way to be driven to Buenos Aires!