After the crappy buses of Bolivia and Northern Argentina, nothing could have prepared us for our luxury first class vehicle with leather seats to Mendoza!! On board we were treated to tea and coffee, dinner with wine, and Rakhee even befriended the conductor, who later invited her to drink mate (a kind of herbal tea- very popular here) with him and the rest of the drivers downstairs. All of this was accompanied by a game of bingo (we didn't win, but the prize was a bottle of wine!) and two movies; the first was The Notebook, which was amazing and made us both cry (go and rent it if you haven't seen it), and the second was Shawshank Redemption, which Marisha hadn't seen. Unfortunately, just as the movie was drawing to a close she fell asleep, and so has missed the point of the whole film and has to watch it all over again!! To add to all this luxury, the snowcapped peaks of the Andes were stretched before us for practically the whole journey and they really were a beautiful sight to behold. As the sun went down, we drifted off to sleep and awoke the next morning to the less glamourous view of the bus terminal in Mendoza.A tout was offering a free ride to a hostel that seemed decent enough (very common), so we headed out of the terminal with him to avoid the mile long taxi queue. We jumped into a very tattered old jeep and were all set to go, when the car wouldn't start! It quickly transpired that the guy had left the lights on all night, thus draining the battery, and although we felt sorry for him, we were eager to check in to a hostel and get on with our day! We made our excuses and headed back to the taxi queue, where we caught a taxi to a really beautiful hostel just outside of the center of town, complete with its own swimming pool! The fact that it was too cold to swim didn't occur to us and we were still impressed!! We had to wait ages to check in, but passed the time lounging around in the hostel living room, eating free breakfast and watching tv! After we had finally checked in, we headed into town for another of our infamous walking tours!Mendoza was much bigger than Salta, and although less landscaped too, it was beautiful in its own way. It was a heady mix of colonial buildings, grassy plazas with fountains, shops, and cobbled pedestrian streets. We took in the usual fare of churches, buildings and museums, including a really cool and abstract modern art musuem, to which we gained free entry because the receptionist was so excited we were English!! Although the museum was quite small, one of the most interesting exhibits was a series of photos of dead fruit done in unusual colours. It sounds really weird, but it worked for us and made a great change from the usual religious and colonial war paintings we had been bombarded with in the previous few weeks. By this point the calling was too strong, and we both succumbed to a little shopping! Nonetheless, we didn't go crazy and only bought one or two items each - all of which we deemed necessary purchases!!! That night in the hostel, we randomly bumped into Jean and Sarah, two of the Irish girls that had stayed in our room on our quick stop in Buenos Aires on the way to Patagonia. It was really nice to catch up with them both and see what we had all been doing in the month or so since we had met, and we arranged to go out together that night. We were joined by Eddie, a Brazilian, and Alain, an Argentine, and the six of us went to sample some of Mendoza's nightlife, since our hostel was situated right in the heart of it all. After a few bars, we got hold of some flyers that gave us girls free entry to a nearby club, however in the confusion over taxis, we somehow lost Jean and Sarah, and it ended up just being four at the club entrance. Inside, the club was huge, but didn't seem very busy. There were loads of bars, a VIP area, a stage and millions of coloured flashing lights. The club quickly filled up, but we just couldn't get into the electronica music that was playing - something we later realised was typical of the Argentine club scene. There was one really random set of RnB, HipHop, 90`s pop and 80s cheese that lasted about twenty minutes, to which we boogied hard of course, but after the electronica came back on we decided to call it a night. It wasn't a bad way to go since it was already 4.30am!!The next morning we were both feeling really ill. We had completely underestimated just how cold Mendoza could get at night, since the days were pretty warm, and all the running about had made us really run down and sick. Rakhee was the worst and stayed in bed practically all day, and whilst Marisha made it out of bed to sit in the common room, she couldn't quite shake the feeling of extreme cold, no matter how many layers she put on!! Rakhee made it out of bed towards the end of the day, in time for us to watch Liverpool and Chelsea in the UEFA Cup Semi Final. Strangely everyone was supporting Liverpool, which was lucky because they won, otherwise we would have had a lot of angry fans on our hands! That night we brought food back to the hostel and had a quiet night in, since we were both feeling pretty sorry for ourselves!Thankfully the next day we were both feeling much better, especially since we had a big activity planned for the afternoon - an activity that had been one of the main reasons for coming to Mendoza - WINE TASTING!! Thats right!! Mendoza is the wine capital of Argentina, and we had been dying to see what it had to offer us since the day we arrived. We passed the morning wandering around the town again, just soaking up the buzzing atmosphere, and also visited two museums. The first was about the history of Mendoza and was set in a beautiful colonial mansion. We were treated to a personalised guided tour of the many rooms (in Spanish), which were filled with scale models, old maps and furniture, all of which were so well preserved. The staff were lovely, asking us both lots of questions about where we were from and how long we were staying, and it quickly became apparent that the museum didn't receive many visitors. The second museum was described in the guide book as containing a series of model replicas of typical scenes from Mendoza, past and present. We walked all the way up and down the street where it was supposed to be about four times, before realising that it was an "outdoor museum", which consisted of a series of boxes on stands in the middle of the street. These boxes contained the model replicas, but vandals had smashed the glass fronts in, or graffitied them, so it was very difficult to see anything. It was a big shame, since the idea of an outdoor museum seemed quite original to us! In the afternoon, our tourbus picked us up for our wine tasting!! EVERYONE on the bus was Argentine or Spanish speaking, leaving us in a minority, but luckily the bus guide spoke English, as she explained that we were to visit two wineries and an olive factory. As we drove out of Mendoza, we were quickly surrounded by beautiful fields of vines, all in beautiful autumn colours, since we had just missed the summer harvest. The first winery we stopped at was called Finkel Fleischman, and was a big corporate kind of place. The grounds were beautifully landscaped, with a pebble drive and a river running past, and inside the place was HUGE. The guide wasn't that friendly, but nonetheless, she took us on a tour of the factory, explaining how the wine was made, from harvesting and selecting grapes, to barrels, bottling and storage. It was a really interesting tour as we saw all parts of the wine making process and started to understand the differences between red and white wine, the different types of grapes, and how the ageing process affected the taste. The best bit obviously came when we got to taste the wine! However, it was a bit of an anti-climax because it wasn't that nice! This, however, didn't seem to stop the other people on our tour bus buying crates of the stuff!! We jumped back into the bus and headed on to our second winery, a small family run one. Here we were treated to an English-speaking tour guide, who explained pretty much the same processes again, however since it was in English, this time we actually understood all of what was said!!! The main differences were that most of the processes that had been automated at Finkel Fleischman, were done by one or two people here, from harvesting grapes, right down to corking and labelling the bottles, and because of this production and variation was obviously much smaller. More to the point, the winery had always been run by the same family, who paid greater attention to the quality of the wines they produced than the quantity. Overall, the place had a much nicer, cosier and altogether more welcoming feel than the large corporate across the way. We finally reached the wine tasting portion and unsurprisingly, the wine tasted better too! Our guide taught us how to taste wine properley, and although we wouldn't call ourselves wine experts just yet, we were definitely getting into the swing of things! We tasted about four wines, one of which was a really yummy white that tasted of Elderflower, and also a really good Malbec, for which Mendoza is famous. Our last stop on the tour was an olive factory! Here we were again treated to an English speaking guide, who showed us first the olive groves and then the inside of the factory, where the olives were separated from their branches and turned into all sorts of products for consumuption. At the end of the tour we were again treated to some tastings, this time of olive oil and french bread! It tasted so good our tastebuds were tingling, and this time we understood the hurried frenzy of the people on our tour bus to buy olive products from factory shop. Unfortunately, we were once again reminded that we were backpacking and couldn't feasibly carry large glass jars of olives, no matter how good they tasted, or how cheap they were!We returned to Mendoza with enough time to pick up our bags and head to the bus station to catch a bus to San Juan, our next destination. This should have been a relatively easy task, but it took us almost 30 minutes to catch a cab, as we dragged our huge backpacks down the road after us. Eventually two kids took pity on us and started helping us try to flag a taxi down. When one eventually stopped, we thanked them as we bundled into the back of the cab, to which they held out their hands asking for money. Now these were not poor kids by any means, and we genuinely didn't have any change, but it paid homage to the old adage that nothing comes for free!!! We sped off towards the bus station and made it with time to spare!! After a quick bathroom trip, we settled into our seats for the short hop to San Juan...