Doing the 8hr journey from Chile to Argentina at night meant we wouldn't waste a precious day sitting on a bus. But things didn't go as planned.

The sleeper buses in South America are comfortable with large reclining "couch-like" seats, allowing for a pretty good nights rest. The plan was to catch the bus at 10.30pm, go to sleep and wake up in Mendoza, Argentina fresh as a daisy. However, we forgot to consider one obvious inconvenience - immigration. At 2am we were rudely awoken to show our passports and get the necessary stamps. All the bags were then removed from the bus, scanned and then opened for drug checks. All this took hours, of which we spent most of this time shivering in the cold, wishing we were in a nice warm bed!

Needless to say, we arrived in Mendoza feeling tired and grumpy. Not the best start to our week in Argentina. We found a hostel and went straight to bed, shattered from our previous sleepless night.

Mendoza is the place to go for wine. 70% of the country's wine is produced in the province. There are dozens of wineries, most of which offer tours and tasting. The wine was the reason we had come and the easiest way to visit them is to hire bikes for a self-guided tour. We hired our bikes from "Mr. Hugo" - a friendly local. He even gave us a glass (well, actually a plastic beaker) of red before we'd even got on our bikes! Very generous.

The day was great. We cycled (or perhaps wobbled) from one winery to the next learning all about wine production ... but the best bit was obviously the tasting. "Malbec" is the definitive Argentine red. Perhaps we were supposed to swill it around our mouths and spit it out, but that's clearly a waste of good wine. We drank every drop! As we cycled to the next winery, we wondered if Argentina have a "no drinking and cycling" law because we were certainly over the limit. We thought we were going to find out the hard way when the police pulled over and wanted "a chat" with us. But it turned out we were going the wrong way and they simply wanted to point us towards the next winery. Brilliant!

At the end of the day Mr Hugo even had another "beaker" of wine waiting for us when we returned his bikes. After our bad start to Argentina, things got better pretty quickly. It was really nice to find that the Argentine people were friendly, helpful and very generous.