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We are off on our big adventure
Hola chicos!
(Roughly means, hey guys, and is how we´re greeted wherever we go)
We´re now in Santiago, Chile after spending a week in Mendoza and San Rafael, the main wine growing areas of Argentina. Mendoza is quite a small city that seems to be kept going by the nearby vineyards and the tourism that they attract. Argentina has something like 1100 vineyards, 950ish of these are in Mendoza.
We of course did a wine tour on our second day in Mendoza, which was interesting but proved to be more informative rather than drinking wine. One of the things we learned was that white wine shouldn´t be kept beyond 5 years whereas a reserve red wine improves with age and can be kept for up to 15 years. To make up for the lack of wine tasting, we decided to up our consumption and skip the rest of the tours. So we chilled out for a few days, shopping at the local markets and enjoyed some very good meals with a lot of Mendozan wine. With all the amazing food that´s available in Mendoza, there´s an unhealthy obsession with hot dogs, or ´panchos´as they´re known there. Clearly it would have been rude not to sample this local delicacy so we happily obliged.
After 4 days in Mendoza we took a short bus journey to San Rafael, which is a much smaller town, further south than Mendoza. We arrived during siesta and it was like a ghost town! We went specially because it´s supposed to be one of the best places in Argentina to go white water rafting, and it was really brilliant. The rafting was great and it was made more fun because we were slotted into a group of 16yr old college kids. At first, we weren´t digging it at all, but the fab thing about the kids was that they just totally got into it and were screaming, shouting and soaking each other and us. There´s some very amusing pictures on our offexploring page if you´re interested.
The only bad thing was that there was only one bus back from the canyon (we thought there were more) which meant we waited 3 hrs. This however, proved to be nothing a few days later when we arrived at the Argentinian/Chilean border, high in the snowy Andes. The scenery was stunning but after 5 hours, it was starting to get a bit samey. Apparently Chile had closed the border for a while. When it opened, not only was there a queue of buses ahead of us to get through, it was also painstakingly slow. Each bag had to be taken off the coach and x-rayed, with the customs officers opening and searching anything that looked dodgy. One woman made the fatal error of trying to smuggle a bag of lentils in. This caused uproar and all kinds of chaos. A note was made in her documents about the smuggling and she had to pay a 100 pesos fine. (about 15 pounds, which is quite a lot in Argentina - it would buy you at least 2 excellent steaks.) Another woman had 2 oranges confiscated but she got away lightly with just a few dirty looks and a scowl.
Anyway, we´re now in Chile for about 2 weeks and will of course keep you updated with our adventures.
Sending lots of love.
Ciao
Clare and Nicky
xxx
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