Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Lorraine and Jay on The Big Trip
A´noon all,
Hope everyone in Ireland and the UK are loving the snow, sounds amazing! Thanks for all the messages on our page, we look mad popular!
We got to Mendoza on Saturday afternoon, eighteen hours on the bus, which was fine. Only prob is that they play these seriously violent movies the whole way through, like full-on 18s type stuff, rather scary! We checked into our hostel and wandered around town for the evening. Mendoza is beautiful, it was flattened by an earthquake in the 1800s, so they rebuilt it from scratch with wide avenues and plazas to act as evacuation points. So there´s a lovely feel about the place, and it´s easy to find our way around! When we were checking in, the girl at reception told us there was a football match on Sunday night if we wanted to try get tickets. We were chatting to an Aussie guy and he directed us to some touts the next morning, bit dodgy!!
We got our tickets on Sunday anyway and headed out of the city to do a wine/bikes tour, only to get there and find out everything was closed on Sunday... stupid tourists! It was River Plate (Mendoza) and Boca Juniors (Buenos Aires), delighted we got tix as we didn´t get to go to a match in Brazil as the season was finished. We met up with a few in the hostel afterwards who were going to the match too, and realised that we were in the fan section, and not the more civilised seated section like them. I came down all ready to go out in a vest top and an Argentinian guy there told me to go and change, take off ALL jewellery, not to take the camera and only take enough cash for a drink... eh what?! So we rocked up to the ol estadia, with money and jewellery in our socks/bra (for me) to find COLUMNS of armed police, police with dogs, police on horses, police on bikes and a police helicopter circling around.. nearly died. Police were actually laughing at the two blondie gringos going into the section...
In the end, it was totally fine, we were at the edge of the section and there were loads of Arg families etc, so it was safe enough. Loads of people had their cameras, so we´re raging we didn´t get any pics! Match was amazing, more for the fans than anything - they were MENTAL! There were fireworks at kick-off and a few mins in, each side unrolled massive flags from the back of the stands and the crowd pulled them down to cover the whole stand - mental!! The fans were totally separated, we were in the River Plate section, who ended up losing two nil, ah! It was a brilliant night, we were thrilled we got to see a match in South America, and the Boca Juniors too! Weirdest thing was that we didn´t see ONE policeman/woman leaving, so the trouble must all happen beforehand...?
We managed the wine tour on the second attempt on Monday.. there´s a lovely man called Mr. Hugo that rents out bikes and gives you a map with a circuit of vineyards and you head off. We were clever about it and pedalled our way to the end, 14km away, and worked our way back. And thank GOD we did! We started at an olive farm, and were shown how they harvest the olives and make olive oil, then we had a tasting at the end of olives, oil and sundried tomatoes - gorgeous! Then we started on the vineyards... They´re all operational vineyards, but as the season is April - September, they have tourists in for tours as well outside that time. So you get brought around and they show you their way of making the wine, it´s really good as each vineyard is different, one could be really big and commercial and another would be a tiny family-owned artisan vineyard. Then you go and do a tasting of some of their wines, ´tasting´ varied from a mouthful of six different wines to massive glasses of two or three wines. We were definitely wobbling by the third tour, so we were DELIGHTED we didn´t have to cycle very far back! Last stop was a liqueur/chocolate maker - the tasting was AMAZING!! Of all the things we´ve done, that was what we´d love to have had people from home with us.. was one of our favourite days so far. Mam, Dad, Carla, Lisa, Jean, you would`ve loved it!
We got back to Mr. Hugo at around six, after seven hours on the road, with sore bums and slightly sore heads.. only for him to offer us MORE wine... We sat out in his garden and everyone else came back in around the same time, so we sat out for a few hours, so much fun! We got back to the hostel after ten, and met up with a group from there and went for a big steak dinner... Jay´s fillet steak beat my sirloin...
We were knackered yesterday, after cycling/drinking/late night, so we chilled around town for the day and made a big chicken curry for dinner - delighted to have something spicy for a change.
Heading to Bariloche by bus tonight, it´s further down south and apparently it was a Swiss colony, so it´s very rustic and has looads of chocolate shops, woo hoo! It´s in the mountains and everyone we´ve met who´s been there has said it´s the best trekking they did, so we´re looking forward to getting our walking boots on again. Our hostel sounds amazing too, it´s on the tenth floor, so the views are meant to be spectacular. We`re getting our first cama bus journey, so we´re highly excited about the luxury that (hopefully) awaits us!
Love to everyone...
- comments