Hola Buenos Aires

February 13th-15th, Mendoza and Buenos Aires, Argentina

Two rainy chilled out days in Mendoza. I've been reading a lot which makes me happy, but also makes me super unsocial. Bernie hung out with a Chilean Police Inspector at the hostel, here with his family. He's such a nice guy, loves chatting but in super quick Spanish. We've regressed to him excitedly saying 'One Direction' and 'Tom Jones' to me every time we cross each other! At 12 am on the 14th, Bernie surprised me with ice cream and chocolates and wine; I didn't even remember that it was Valentines Day!

Last night, the 14th, we got on a 12 hour bus and today we're in Buenos Aires!!! We haven't left the hotel all day, pretty tired but we have a lot of time (approx 10 days) in BA because we decided to skip traveling to the South of Argentina. Gotta pick your travels in these big countries, don't want to be hopping on and off buses every night. 

Tonight, Chis who owns this hostel cooked a dinner of steak and empanadas for a group of 10 of us. The empanadas were amazing, the steak would've been better if the Argentinians didn't eat theirs well done. In true Argentinian style, dinner was served at 11:30 pm and now it's 2:30 am and we're waiting for everyone to get ready so we can leave to party! 

Vino y asado

February 12th, Mendoza Argentina

After 2 lazy-ish days, we finally decided to do a wine tour. The weather here is hot hot hot (38 degrees Celcius) so it´s quite hard to do anyhing but lounge about and eat meat and drink wine. This afternoon, we went to 2 vineyards and an olive oil factory. It was really interesting because I don´t know half as much about wine, even though I drink tons!

We went to Lujan de Cuyo district which is one of the oldest wine producing areas in Argentina and produces 60% of all Argentinian wines. On the drive there, we passed big signs saying "Tierra Malbec" which got us really excited. For some people, visiting churches or museums or Disneyland gets them excited. For us, visiting the Malbec vineyards was a religious experience in itself! The first vineyard is almost 200 years old called "Dante Robino". Our English speaking guide explained the entire wine making process, this vineyard specialises in Malbec and Sparkling Wines. We even got to taste some grapes of the vines, which are protected by a metal covering from hail storms.

The most important things I learnt were that first - Prosecco, Cava, sparkling wines of any names are actually all the same as Champaigne (which is trademarked). I always thought they were different drinks! The second thing is that if you are buying a young wine (usually you can determine this by price and brand) do not go for older years thinking it will be better; instead always buy a wine in the year closest to the one you are in. Once you pour red wine into a glass, if it has brownish tints, it is probably not good to drink. And finally, if you buy white wine, when you pour it into a glass it should be light yellow with white tints. If it is dark yellow with brownish tints, throw the wine away.

We then went to the tasting room and had 2 reds and a white sparkling wine. Wine tasting is actually the only sophisticated way you can down glasses of wine, no judgement! They bring you the new glasses so quick that you have no choice, and I ain´t going to waste any wine in the spit bucket! We liked the wines but not enough to buy bottles and lug them around the rest of Argentina, Brazil and Colombia in our backpacks.

The second vinyard we visited was a new vinyard opened in 2006 and family run. This looked pretty new and most of the vines would only be ready 2-3 years from now. Once again, did a tour and then wine tasting of 3 different wines. This vinyard specialises in ´Carmenere´ wines and actually is in the top 5 Carmeneres in the world. We liked one of them enough to buy, though I´m sure we´ll have drunk it before even leaving Mendoza.

Finally on to the olive oil factory. We weren´t too interested at first but this was actually quite cool. At the end they had a lot of bread with different toppings to try out the different olive oils. As much as I like wine, I love bread more so this was the highpoint for me :)

Finally back at the hostel, we decided to go for some asado (bbq) highly recommended by an Irish couple we met earlier in the day and ordered the meat sharing platter. Though warned by our waitress that it was huge, we still went for it and it was the best meat I´ve eaten so far... ever. Bernie got the meat sweats and had to stop even though we had about half remaining but got it packed for breakfast tomorrow! So far Argentina is everything we´d hoped for -- great meat and wine!

A relaxed day

February 11th, Mendoza Argentina

 

Argentina! And the Blue Dollar

February 10th, Mendoza Argentina

We're finally in Argentina, we've waited so long and we're finally here! We took the 'Tur Bus' and got to the border at around 3 am and crossed through immigration very easily, it's definitely nothing like our previous border crossings. In fact I didn't even know we'd already passed out of Chile, it was that smooth! Got to Mendoza around 7 am and it was already hot. Luckily our hostel 'Chumbas Hostal' is close to the bus terminal so we walked there and once again we lucked out, this place is great and even has a pool! Unfortunately we had to wait around till 10 am till our room was ready so Bernie took a nap while I ran out of Daily Mail articles to read on the flooding and bad weather in England.

Around 12 pm we began our treasure hunt... for money. In the other countries, the problem was that the ATMs didn't have enough cash to dispense so there was nothing we could really do. But we were prepared for Argentina as the money exchange in this country is truly unique. Unfortunately for the Argentinians, the peso fluctuates a lot and is unstable, so the locals have a hard time exchanging pesos for other currencies. As a result of this, a parallel illegal market thrives called the 'Blue Dollar'. There is an official exchange rate of course, but if you have US dollars ideally, you can exchange them for pesos in the Blue Dollar market for one and a half times the amount (versus withdrawing cash from an ATM, exchanging at the official rate etc). Though unofficial, it's everywhere and that's the way the exchange works in this country. Luckily, I was well up to speed on the workings of the Blue Dollar thanks to Dolores!

Berns and I thought it would be easy to buy dollars in one of the countries we were traveling through before Argentina. This was not the case sadly, most of the time we couldn't even get the local currency, so we found out about Azimo. It's a site that let's you transfer money from your UK bank account and you can pick up cash in pesos, but changed at the blue dollar rate. Though it's not widely heard of, we tried it and seemed simple enough. The problem started when we walked for ages around the city and couldn't find the pick up point. When we finally called Azimo for an alternate pick up location, it was shut for lunch from 1 pm-4:30 pm, as was most things in this city. At this point we had no money at all, couldn't find any money changers even at the official rate and had been walking in 36*C heat for hours. I thought Bernie would die from thirst but we couldn't buy water because no one accepts card here!

Finally finally, we went to the one place that has never let me down, my true temple, McDonalds! Haha after finally reaching Argentina, our first meal was at Mcdonalds! They accepted American Express cards so at least we had a meal until we finally picked up our cash. I'd highly recommend Azimo, we bought £700 worth of money for £500 so pretty big savings.

After this eventful day, we went back to the hostel, too tired to even get in the pool. I have a terrible cough- it was quite hilarious acting it out in the pharmacy since we didn't learn the word for phlegm (gross I know, sorry!). I was beyond exhausted but Bernie and his love of steak made me go for dinner. And to be honest, it was amazing. We spent the night talking about books and whatnot, a great night with some lovely Malbec and steak at Don Mario. We had a bit of a language issue and Bernie's steak wasn't rare but medium and they replaced the entire thing!

Mendoza is wine country, my favourite wines are from this place so I cannot wait to check out the vineyard tours. There's a ton of things to do here so tomorrow we're starting out with a wine tour on horseback (!!!) and thinking of going white water rafting and maybe even paragliding. Let's see what happens.

 

 

Cough syrup