Cordoba, to be perfectly honest wasn't all that great I'm sad to say. Those that had been before raved about the nightlife and informed us the town was as beautiful as Cafayate. Perhaps it is, normally, but we had only had one day to explore Cordoba and that just happened to be a Sunday. Nothing is open or working on a sunday and it was more like a ghost town than a university city. We had driven twelve hours to arrive and it was going to take us twelve hours to reach our next destination and all we could do was hang out in the hostel. So, to summarise, the stay was pointless. This made the long drive the following day all the more irritating and after an hour we dug deep in our bags for some Diazepam and delved into a deep sleep. We stopped, eleven hours later, in the heart of Mendoza, Argentina's most popular and profitable wine region. Having reached Mendoza, Dan and I decided to leave the tour company that we were travelling with and complete the rest of our trip in South America on our own. We didn't want to spend another two days on a hot truck just to spend one night in the middle "nothing-to-do-ville." So, we said our goodbyes and asked the driver to drop us off in town, along with another couple of travellers who had decided to leave the trip aswell. The driver pulled over outside a small steakhouse, about a twenty minute walk from the centre of town where we had booked a hostel. There we stayed for the next five hours drinking champagne at $2 a bottle! After a while it became apparent that the chances of any of us carrying our bags into town to find the hostel were slim to none so Dan, being my drunken hero, managed to switch our reservation to the hostel across the road with no extra charge! The next day we took a taxi into Lujan de Soya which is where the vineyard and winery of Clos de Chacras is loacted. Clos de Chacras is well loved red wine in Argentina, and it exports to the UK frequently. We had a look around the vineyard and the garden and decided to stay for lunch. Lunch was a five course meal, with a glass of different red wine served with each dish. The menu consisted of salads, fish, chicken, beef and the most amazing selection of desserts and each wine complimented the food wonderfully. It was spectacular, and the wines were premium to say the very least! We enjoyed the day so much that we booked lunch at another winery, Familia Zuccardi, the next day. The second day was set in a vineyard that promised to suffocate you, let alone take your breath away. Truly stunning, it went on for acres, further than the eye could see. Our table, situated in a small glass room in the middle of the vineyard, meant we could really experience lunch the Argetinian way. The wine was better than the day before, the waiter taking us from the sparkling white through to the mature dessert wines with frequent top ups! The food, however, wasn't up to scratch and was a little to pretentious for my taste. In fact I'm not sure sweetcorn ice-cream and mushroom creme brulee is to anybody's taste! After lunch the owner took us on a tour of the winery and explained how each of their wine is made and how long it takes to produce. In each day there are 250,000 bottles of wine being produced in the winery! Obviously, I invited him for dinner the next time he was in the UK! We returned to the hostel to pack and grabbed a taxi to the local bus station where we were due to board the night bus to Santiago, Chile. We arrived with plenty of time and began loading our bags when the 'gentleman' helping with the luggage demanded a tip. I refused and we had a very long and heated discussion before he, eventually, let me board the bus. I'd already joined the 'No Tip Revolution' but now I wanted to chair it! We travelled through the night and got to the Argentina/Chile border in the early hours of the morning. It took us over an hour to pass the through Argentinian gates and we waited another 45 minutes at the Chilean office while they checked our bags for apples! Not cocaine, not guns, apples! Still, each to their own! Another three hours on the night bus and we were in Santiago, Chile! We took a taxi into town and managed to find a hostel, that would agree to an early check-in, within a couple of hours. There we slept for a solid 18 hours! Argentina was lovely. But that's it really, lovely. I certainly enjoyed all the activities I took part in, absolutlely loved the food and could have bathed in the wine but no expectation was exceeded. Perhaps, that's an unfair assessment and based on the fact that my expectations were, in fact , too high. Maybe Bolivia and Peru offered so much more to my travels than I thought they would that I expected the same of Argentina. The people are beautiful, the archictecture unique and the landscape stunning but there is a monotony to the day that made me feel Argentina was stuck in time, like it hadn't moved on in a while. But, it was lovely!

Thought of the Day: You really can have too much of a good thing. Argentina has the largest consumption of beef in the world aswell as the highest rate of bulimia!