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6 Days in Mendoza
We spent quite a long time in Mendoza by our standards. There seemed to be masses to do and luckily we found ourselves a very cheap but good hostel about 10 minutes walk from the main plaza. We spent quite a lot of time wondering round the city centre, shopping (they have C&A and Etam!) and drinking coffee/beer in one of the numerous pavement cafes. Although it`s a city and is very busy we found there to be a really relaxed environment and felt very at home there. It`s a much more European feeling city than others we`ve been to but also managed to retain many of the cultures of Argentina. The weather was great too, sunny but not too hot in the middle of the day and we had our first bit of rain since the Inca Trail a month ago! We got quite excited and I ended up watching it for a while as Craig watched the tennis and football with some Argentinian guys.
Organised Tours
Generally we`ve grown tired of the conventional tours you can take to just about anywhere so we organised two of our own: the great plaza tour and the massive park tour! Mendoza has five main plazas around the centre. Plazas San Martin, España, Italia and Chile are situated in a big square circuit around the main plaza, Independencia. We walked to each and gave them all marks out of 10 according to certain criteria (fountains, shade, seats, etc). Plazas España and Independencia won with 9/10 each while Plaza Chile came last with 2/10 (shows what the Argentinians think of Chile!). It was a fun day and much more interesting that taking an official tour. The massive park tour was also good fun although we got shouted at for walking across some grass! It was a bit disappointing you couldn`t sit on any nice grass but we managed to find a shady spot to have a picnic and relax for a few hours (it`s such a hard life travelling!).
Bodegas Tour
We did however do one organised tour and that was to two bodegas or wineries. We visited Bodegas Lopez which has produced wine on a massive scale for over 100 years. The winery can store up to 34 million litres of the stuff! We had a pretty quick look round, at the casks storing the wine and also the bottling plant, then went into a very posh looking cellar to sample their wares. We were given a white and a red and that was it! Slightly miffed (at the Peruvian winery we tried about 10!) we moved onto the second winery (I`ve forgotten the name) which was a much smaller family run place. It was pretty much the same tour but we were given so much more information and more wine to try! The girl doing the tour explained the different techniques for checking the whites and reds and we had fun tasting and examining the wines! The Mendoza region is renouned for it`s brilliant Malbec so we purchased a good bottle for 2 pounds and drank it back at the hostel with the most amazing steak ever.
Festival of Water
On our last night in Mendoza we planned to go out for a few drinks (why do we always do this the night before a bus journey) but when we got to the main plaza it was packed with people and a massive stage. They were having a festival of water, complete with festival queens competing for the title! We stayed and watched for a few hours and it was amazing: a massive variety of song and dance from around Argentina and also from different countries. They also had food stands from around the world. It was completey unexpected but definately made our time in Mendoza a diverse one!
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