Mendoza and on...

In our heads, Mendoza was going to be a bigger, slightly worldlier, more mature version of Cafayate. I expected to see debonaire Mendochinos swilling wine in sunny street bars, with the aroma of sizzling steak wafting trough the air. Their discussions of that year's Malbec grape harvest interrupted occasionally by a slurp from a Mate cup, a quick tango or perhaps a kick-about with some street kids. This day-dream was swiftly shattered when we arrived to find our hostel was on a street surrounded by chavvy shoppers sporting tracksuits and the dodgiest haircuts I've seen since approximately 1988.Mullets and Rat Tails worn with careless abandon and not a hint of irony - I felt like I had stepped back in time to the shopping centre of my childhood.

This freaky Essex nightmare was further enhanced by the plethora of "vintage" Ford cars littering the streets. GT's, Anglias, Sierras, wait, was that an Escort XR3i ?!?!? Cars that would've long been assigned to the scrap heap in the UK quite happily chug, cough, splutter, and limp their way along the wide tree lined avenues of Mendoza. We wonder how they even get started, let alone transport their insane drivers to their destination. (All over South America, as far as we can tell, there are no "rules of the road" - it's simply every man/woman/dog for him/her/itself. We've seen a couple of news reports where there has been a road accident and I wonder; a) why are they surprised? and b) how are there not more?? I remember being incredulous when we first saw a learner driver - "what they TEACH people to drive like this?!?!?")

Mendoza was flattened in 1861 by an earthquake which destroyed its colonial glories, so there are no sights or places of historical interest to see as such. Parque General San Martin is a featured highlight in the guidebooks, but again, is not as nice as we hoped. Dusty tracks through the park are interwoven with too many roads full of dirty, noisy cars. The monument and statue at Cerro Gloria to San Martin's liberation of Argentina, Peru and Chile from Spanish rule is an impressive memorial and worth the steep walk to the top. However the panoramic views across Mendoza that this climb affords are not as good as, say, the views across Cusco from Sacsayhuaman, or the views from Parc Guell across Barcelona certainly. The park has a nice pretty lake occupied by energetic rowers, with hoards of joggers and roller-bladers fighting for space around the outside which completely disproves my theories relating to Argentine obesity.

Our 2nd hostel in Mendoza - Hostel Empedrado, is probably the best we've stayed at so far. I suspect that the free glass of wine every night had something to do with that. Our 1st night was spent sampling some local wines, guided by a dishevelled Argentine lady who, judging by her perceptible sway and the slightly glazed expression in her eyes, had probably been wine "tasting" all day. As she knocked back her 5th glass we began to wonder if she was a qualified wine teacher at all or rather just a qualified alcoholic who'd stumbled on a guarantee of getting drunk every day for free. The following evening we partook in a "traditional" asado (Argentine BBQ) which consisted of a limp salad drenched in salt and huge chunks of fatty meat served up by a burly chef who looked unfamiliar with the concept of personal hygiene and certainly didn't want to be waiting on pissed tourists. The meal was saved by meeting some fellow gringos (from Australia and Ilford!) who helped us polish off 4 bottles of red whilst trading travelling stories and making various comparisons on the shortcomings of our home nations. It was nice to spend time talking with others, as conversation can occasionally run dry when it's just the two of you....

Hostels are funny places. At best you can hope to meet some like-minded people of a similar age and disposition, but more often than not these forced encounters are performed skulking around the kitchen pretending not to notice each other or get in each others way, with "hola" grudgingly murmured when cornered.Of course that is not true for all the places we've stayed so far and indeed some people are extremely friendly even given the distinct language barrier created by us lazy Brits. There are some groups though that it is impossible to ignore - I am talking of course about the Brazilians. They have a special knack of congregating in large groups, being exceedingly obnoxious and extremely LOUD. We've had the misfortune of being on a few day-trips with groups of them and they've often come close to ruining the whole experience of whatever trip we're on. However, if you happen to get roped into one of their booze fuelled impromptu gatherings, they can actually turn out to be a rather nice and generous breed of people. This was demonstrated at our first hostel in Mendoza when we returned to find one of these gregarious groups holding court in the passageway leading to our room. Having no choice but to venture through the greasy, rowdy throng we were soon plied with neat whiskey and confounded by an intermittent conversation about our travels and their sexual conquests. (It's amazing what you realise you didn't want to know with a few words of Spanish and English between you.) At another hostel we soon realised that if you are not involved in their merry-making, you'll be treated to sleepless nights whilst they make more noise than a pack of mating howler monkeys with their raucous banter outside your bedroom window.

Excursions are often better for meeting people, being more specific than the fact that you're each just staying in the same town. We've managed to forge deep facebook friendships with couples and groups we've met in Peru, Bolivia and now Argentina. Sometimes though, a polite acceptance of someone's attempts at conversations can mean that you're stranded with the dullest person on the bus and I often counter these early morning engagements with a "sodoffimsleeping" slouch. I don't think that I'm known for my welcoming "come say hi!" face, so I was shocked when on our wine excursion in Mendoza, a chap plonked himself down next to me and promptly started regaling me with his life story. Being stuck on a minibus with this oddball and with no obvious means of escape, I feigned interest and continued this charade all the way to the first stop.

Mendoza is the wine capital of Argentina, so I was as giddy as a schoolgirl at a Justin Bieber concert at the prospect of visiting its vineyards. We visited 3 wineries and disappointingly we can't remember the names of the first 2 due to the fact that neither of us particularly rated the wines we tried.The first visit was enlivened by a group of over enthusiastic Israeli girls who insisted on screeching the lyrics to every s*** song that came on the radio.Cheerfully, their irritating youthful energy was brought to a crashing halt when the wine conspired to send them to sleep. The 2nd location was memorable as being the first organic winery in Mendoza and the 3rd winery, Zuccardi, was the best in all respects. The most professional and enthusiastic English speaking guides, and the best wines we had tried that day. My bag is getting very heavy from all of these tours! We also visited a quaint olive oil factory and a chocolate factory. Sadly, we saw evidence of neither a mysterious eccentric, a glass elevator or oompaloompahs.

We broke up our time in Mendoza with a trip to San Juan to go and visit Parque Ischigualasto. This proved to be an expensive waste of time. We stayed 2 nights in SJ at a nasty little hostel blighted by the afore-mentioned noisy Brazilians, and a broken window letting in the cold night air. San Juan has nothing to keep you there, unless you want to marvel at their polished pavements...

Our trip to the valley began with our driver - a balding oaf sporting the kind of beer-gut that would make Homer Simpson proud - driving an hour towards our destination, only to have to turn back to San Juan when he realised that he had forgotten to pick up 2 passengers. After trawling the hostels searching for the missing guests, he finally gives up. So now that we're over 2 hours behind schedule, he hurtles along the undulating road towards the village of San Augustin de Valle Fertil, making us in the back of the minibus feel like we were on a runaway rollercoaster. I always start getting nervous when drivers start playing chicken with oncoming traffic, so I made sure Katy and I were securely fastened in. No sooner had we adjusted our seatbelts then the driver slammed on his brakes narrowly avoiding a truck reversing from a blind side street sending the other passengers tumbling from their seats. Shaken, they all promptly fasten their seatbelts.

The national park, referred to as "Valle de la Luna", is an awesome spectacle with other-worldly landscapes sculpted by two million years of erosion, wind and water.Set in a desert valley between two mountain ranges, it is considered one of the greatest dinosaur graveyards on the planet. Unfortunately though, we missed out on the history and information part of the tour, as it was all in Spanish, so Katy and I trundled along behind the rest of the group taking photos, occasionally trying to translate the guide, and generally behaving like bored pupils on a school trip.

The park and its stunning rock formations are well worth a visit, but the experience was tainted by the feeling of wishing we had researched it a bit more, and that we had been somewhat ripped off.

We were glad to return to Mendoza and the impending excursion that we had booked for our last night there. I've never been that keen on horses as I always get the feeling that they can sense a city boy from a thousand yards and decide to misbehave accordingly, but as we were in the land of gauchos, and there was the promise of a romantic sunset, red wine and asado at the end of it, I figured it was something that we should partake in. I had assumed that, being female, Katy would be thrilled to be reliving childhood dreams of horses and 'my little ponies', or whatever it is that girls daydream about...but whatever tensions I had paled into insignificance when as we set off, she calmly revealed that horses terrify her since she was thrown from one as a child!

We both conquered our nervousness and enjoyed the pleasant trip as we were led in horsey convoy through the chilly hills high above Mendoza by a real life gaucho, who I'm fairly sure made all the boys want to be him and the girls want to be with him. An hour and half later we returned to the farm to the welcoming smell of grilled meat and the sight of (more!) red wine waiting on the table. I got down from my horse with as much grace as a man who's repeatedly been whacked in the nuts can manage and wondered how cowboys ever have families... We shivered round a campfire and washed down the chewy, fatty asado meat with cups of cold red wine, all in all the excursion had perhaps been a bit pony (!) and not quite as promised, but nonetheless we congratulated ourselves for overcoming our equestrian fears and another accomplishment on our travels.

The sun is attempting to warm the chilly morning air when we check out of our hostel so we wander through the grid-like streets to one of the towns many plazas and soak up some rays for a while.It's still early, but that hasn't deterred the hordes of amorous teens populating the park, locking lips as if in a rite of passage to earn their reputation as "latino lovers". Trying to find a park bench that isn't smeared with the hormones of teenage lovers is like trying to find a space of pavement not crapped on in La Boca.

We leave Mendoza with the feeling that Argentina is making us fat and lazy. The steaks and red wine are so fantastic and so reasonably priced that it's hard to leave them alone. But other local "specialities", such as the disgusting Milanese (a giant deep fried breaded meat escalope/schnitzel type affair that I can't understand for the life of me what it is about it that they find it so amazing) and the lack of vegetables each day is making our faces greasier than before. It feels as if we're oozing meat and red wine from every pore and I wonder if that's why we keep getting followed everywhere by dogs....