Hola!

We are currently killing time as we have to wait 6 hours before our next 20 hour coach journey leaves for Salta. We arrived in Mendoza five days ago now for what we thought was going to be an adrenaline junkies paradise... oh, how wrong we were!

Soon after arriving we booked ourselves on a two day tour which included; trekking in the andes, rappelling (which we would later find out was absailing),swimming in hot springs, a BBQ, a party and then the next day full moon rafting and full moon party. The tour did have one obvious drawback, fact it started at 9 am, which may sound like a reasonable time however over the past six weeks we have both become nocturnal creatures and the chances of us waking up in time for the tour were slim especially since we lacked an alarm clock.

Amazingly, we managed to adapted to this lifestyle change and make the tour on time. We then took a coach journey for around an hour to the first stage of the Andes mountain range. As we looked up at the surrounding mountain range stood in our pumps, we began to think we were possibly slightly under prepared this was basically confirmed when we were handed harnesses and helmets by the guides. We then began our ascent at a very very very slow pace almost a crawling pace, I asumed this was because we were going to be trekking for a long time. After a 30 minutes crawl we had made it too our summit, hardley the strenous work out we had expected and it hardly warrented the helmet and harness. We we're both equally confused so we began asking what the helmet was for, we were then told that the main focus of the tour was the absailing not the trekking something the Argentinean saleswomen who spoke little English had not told us. Luckily neither of us have a fear of heights as we were about to absail three cliff faces ranging from 20 meters to 45 meters. The absailing was deffinatly a welcomed surprise after the disappointing trekking.After the absailing we headed for the lunch then the hot springs which made a nice relaxing afternoon which we spent with an Australian couple and a Candadian couple leading yet again to people questioning mine and Charles relationship much to our embarressment. We then spent that night eating a ridiculous amount of meat at the BBQ (even enough to fill Charles) and drinking more martini.

We spent the next day returning to our previous sleeping pattern and then wandering around the city of Mendoza getting to know the area until it was time to go rafting. We set off for rafting around 9pm and arrived to there for 10:30, as we arrived we noticed the lack of English speaking organisers so we waited with a couple from Norway and some Ozzies and Kiwis who shared our lack of understanding of the situation. We eventually got out on the water in the raft however i'm not sure white water rafting was an accurate discription of what we did as it was less thrilling than the rapids at Alton Towers. The views however was incredible but we had hoped for much more in the form of rafting as it was only 30 minutes long as well. The party afterwards was fun as there was a big fire and a big crowd dancing round it and more martini, which made us feel less bad about seemingly been the only two people there who really couldn't dance. We then spent the rest of our days in Mendoza exploring the city and making the most of the crazily cheap steak dinners. We were caught however in a thunderstorm last night so we decided to purchase 1kg tub of ice cream each and wait for the storm to finish... good times!

Hope all is well back in Brighouse!

Max x

P.s photos will follow shortly!