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Arrived in Mendoza after 21hrs on the bus from Bariloche...not the best journey as we had been saying our goodbyes in Bariloche till the wee hours but we made it!
We stayed in Casa del Pueblo in Mendoza and just relaxed again on our first day and walked around the town and saw the different plazas and streets.There was some kind of dance recital going on across from our hostel with all the people in their traditional clothes so we watched that for a while. The streets in Mendoza are all really wide after a devastating earthquake in 1861 destroyed the city,the people decided to rebuild the streets wider and have more plazas as places to take refuge in case it happened again. As we were in Mendoza it would have been rude not to book a wine tour to see the many vineyards in the area. We went with Mr.Hugos Wine Tours...a decision definitely not regretted! We arrived at his house at 9.00am where we collected our bikes and our maps for the day of sightseeing and winetasting. There was a total of 9 vineyards on the map so we decided to make life easier on ourselves and go to the furthest away vineyard first and work our way back to base...another wise decision! There was 7 of us in total doing the tour so it was great fun cycling around for the day.
We had a first tour of a vineyard where you get to taste a selection of their best wines and they explain the whole process,which is fascinating....they even bring in barrels from certain areas of France because the trees grown there give the wine a better flavour after they are stored on the barrels for a certain length of time. There are some people in the profession who can taste a glass of wine and tell you where exactly in France the trees were grown that the wine was stored in....we are not that good...YET!!
The scenery was amazing along the way as you'll see from the photos and we soon discovered it was cheaper to buy a bottle of wine between us and share it rather than doing a winetasting in every vineyard,very clever us backpackers!! We arrived back to Mr. Hugos around half seven,very happy bikers of course and he invited us in for more wine tasting which of course we couldnt refuse so we sat in his garden for another 2 hours 'tasting' loads of wine. Would definitely recommend his company,nearly felt like one of his grandchildren after the day when he was putting us all on the bus home! Brilliant day overall but our legs felt the cycling the next day...not to mention the heads!!
Went for a long walk around the other end of Mendoza and ended up going to Mendoza Zoo.This was class and they had great animals as you can see from the photos.Only scary thing was when we were walking along a path and there was a big lump of meat in the middle of the path right where the tigers are but there was no tiger in the cage...we didnt hang around for long to see if anything came looking for lunch! Got some good pics of tigers though so you'll understand why we didnt wait around.
That night we headed off again on a night bus to Salta for more adventures!
Mendoza Done!
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