A Week in Mendoza

We’ve spent the last week of our travels in the city of Mendoza in Argentina.  The city is a quite a large city on the western side of the country around halfway up.  The city is actually only an hour or two away from the border to Chile.  For travellers, there are really two reasons to visit Mendoza: the wineries, and its proximity to Aconcagua – the tallest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas.   Apart from these two attractions, the city is also quite a beautiful city just for walking.  The city is full of parks and plazas, restaurants, cafes, shops, and the like.

We arrived in Mendoza after a long bus ride from Bariloche.  The ride took us around 20 hours or so through the Argentina countryside, and again we saw some beautiful scenery.  The bus system in Argentina (and I hear most of the rest of South America) is quite popular.  It is the main choice of transportation for travellers and locals as well.  The buses are all very comfortable, relatively cheap, and quite well organized.  Each city has a large bus station where you can purchase tickets to pretty much anywhere. We expect to be using the bus system a lot over the coming months.

At the bus station in Mendoza we were met by a friendly local hostel owner who offered us a room at his hostel.  Usually hostel owners that wait in bus terminals are kind of shady, but this guy seemed OK, so we went with him. The hostel was only a five minute walk from the bus station so we got there quickly and got set up with a room.  The hostel was kind of run down, but the people there were all very friendly.  This was the first hostel we’ve been to where there was a number of English speaking travellers, so we were looking forward to some good socializing with other people.  Most of the trip so far we haven’t met any other English travellers, so we’ve been pretty much a bunch of loners.  We hooked up with a guy from Belgium who had just come off the bus with us, and we set out to explore the town.

As we walked around town we came across a lot of city squares with small parks and big water fountains and monuments.  After walking around for an hour or two, we stopped at a sidewalk restaurant and had our first Mendoza meal - steak and wine of course.  The steaks here are fantastic.  Big, thick, and grilled to perfection.  The wine too, was fantastic.  This was our first bottle of many in Mendoza. Afterwards we walked around in the giant park on the opposite side of town.  The park (Park San Martin) is huge.  It is probably at least 50 square kilometers, and it contains a zoo, a few stadiums, a golf course, and a small mountain, that we ended up climbing later in the week.

As we walked back we picked up some more bottles of wine from the supermarket along with some pasta, and we cooked up a big meal at the hostel and shared the food and wine with the other travellers at the hostel.  We had a great night drinking wine, and telling travel stories. Along with the guy from Belgium, we also met a fun couple from Slovenia, and another from the US.

A day or two later we all got together and went on a tour of the local wineries.  We took a city bus out of town to the wine region, and rented bikes and spent the day biking from winery to winery sampling their wares and having a great time.  We sampled wine, olive oils, chocolates, sauces, liquors, and more, but the highlight was definitely the wine.

The Mendoza area is famous for its Malbec wine.  It has actually been our favorite wine back home for quite some time, so it was nice to see where it comes from and to taste all the different varieties.  We were able to sample all the different variations: new, old, aged in oak barrels, blends, and more varieties of grapes.  All of the wines that we sampled at the wineries were good, but our favorite was one of the ones we got at a restaurant downtown.  It was a local wine called Santa Julia from the Zuccardi family winery. If you can find that at the LCBO back in Canada, I suggest you try it.  That winery was a bit further away, so we didn’t visit it, although I’m sure it would have been good.

It was around 3 or so days into our stay in Mendoza that we started to notice a bit of a problem with the hostel.   I mentioned earlier that the hostel we were at was a little run down – but we were willing to deal with that as the owner and guests were all very friendly.  When we woke up one morning I noticed a large number of insect bites all over my body.  Joh also had a few.  All over my back and arms, and even a bunch on my face.  It was pretty bad.  Due to the heat we had left the window open all night, and we guessed that a swarm of mosquitos had come in and had a feast.  But after 24 hours or so the bites didn’t look like mosquito bites.  We guessed that it was bed bugs.  Not really that surprising.  The bedrooms and beds were not that clean.  We had put up with it for a few nights, but now that we realized that it was bed bugs, we decided to leave and find a new place.  We booked into a nicer hotel and stayed there the duration of the week.

The last few days have been spent kind of lazily.  We’ve been very indecisive as to where to go next, so we ended up procrastinating and staying a few extra days.  We wanted to go see Aconcagua, but all the hostels, hotels, and cabins were all booked.  Then we wanted to go to another small town nearby, but that also was booked.  It seems that this is a bad time of year to just travel day-by-day.  Almost everywhere you need to book many days in advance.   Eventually, we made our decision and we booked another bus ride and a hostel in Valparaiso, Chile.

Valparaiso is a city a little ways away from the capital of Santiago.  The city was recommended to us by some other travellers and we’re looking forward to it.  We’re not quite done with Argentina yet.   After a little time in Chile, we’ll be back to explore the northern regions of Salta and Iguazu Falls.  We just figured that if we head up north now, we would end up missing Chile, which would be a shame.

So now we’re on a bus taking us across the border into Chile.  This promises to be the most picturesque ride yet, as we need to cross directly through the Andes.  It’s possible that we may even see Aconcagua.  We’ll try get a photo or two.

As usual, Joh will post an album of photos from Mendoza soon…