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Dani on Tour
The 19h bus trip from Bariloche to Mendoza was like hell!! At the beginning it was quite alright, we had the seats in the first row, it was sunny and quite comfortable. The landscape/scenery for the first 1.5h was incredible beautiful (once again). Come the night and everything went downhill. It was freezing in the bus, we could not get comfortable nor sleep and the food was rubbish too (apart from that they start eating dinner at 22.00h and we already tried to sleep)!!
How glad we were to arrive at 07.30am in Mendoza! Soon after we checked into a hostel near the main bus terminal and had a (very) hot shower which actually kind of woke us up. We walked into town to explore the city centre which was quite nice and the main street there looked a little bit like the "Graben" in Vienna (nice little coffee places, restaurants and shops).
Around midday we were already on the bus for 40min in the nearby wine region - a must to go there being in Mendoza! we thought. We hired a bike (complete rip off) and cycled around. It was quite bizarre to see people living so poor amongst the vinyards and the more or less posh wineries. I felt really uncomfortable. Our first stop was a place were they produce their own liqueur and chocolate and jam. That was a good place to start off I think because the liqueur was absolutely fantastic and the jams too! After we went for lunch to a gourmet place they call it but it was again, another ripp off. The wine was not good, the service bad and no choice of food. The meal we got was cold...we soon discovered that the bike renter got commission for us having lunch there...how cheeky!
The 3rd and last place was great. A winery were we did a tour and also got to taste some wine! They even gave us a bottle of wine for free!
Because we were still exhausted from the mammut bus trip we had an early night that night...and a loooong sleep in the next morning, how got that felt! We actually wanted to visit a nearby thermal bath and spa that day but then decided to walk a bit more around Mendoza after having brunch on the "Graben". The huge park area they have at one end of the city was great - a lot of young people around, a lake, palmtrees etc. and the weather was great too! We did enjoy ourselves there and in the evening went to eat another (and probably last) great argentinian steak and some more wine of course (I still don't think we are alcoholics :-). It was still warm in the evening and we could sit outside and that felt really like in summer! I do not know if it was the weather or the wine but we had to take a taxi home because we did not felt save walking back to our hostel after dinner...the taxi driver was a crazy driver as well, we suspected that he has a bottle of wine hidden somewhere...he repeated things all the time, drove like Schumacher and laughed like mad...but we had a lot of fun too and were glad to arrive home safely!
The next morning we took the bus to Uspallata - some rural village in the mountains, 2h away from Mendoza...
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