19th - 24th August 2007
Mendoza is a lovely city, full of good bars, restaraunts and great architecture. It feels like we would imagine an Italian town to look. There is a large student population here so the place always seems lively. Our hostel was a very cool place, in a modern large house, with pool table, ping pong, poker table, cable TV and a swimming pool in the back (far too cold to use at the moment). We spent a few more days chilling out, doing as the locals do (F all), and then went on a day trip to a ski resort called Los Penitentes. It felt good for us both to get back on the slopes again. The conditions werent great as it was towards the end of the season, the snow was pretty crap and felt like ice in places. But we both had a fantastic time and realised yet again how much we love skiing. It was a great day, blue skies and bright sun, it was so hot we were skiing in t shirts. We met an English guy from Bolton called Andy and spent some of the day skiing with him. We also went on a days wine tour, which consisted of visiting 2 wineries a spirit distillary and an absolutely fantastic meal which went on for about 3 hours with our wine glasses being topped up constantly. Funnily enough this is perhaps the only tour we have been on in South America which consisted of about 90% English people. This was the largest concentration of Brits we had seen for the whole trip, bloody classic, bit of free plonk and you can guarranteed the English get involved. This made for a more enjoyable trip and we spent most of the day with a couple of Newcastle lads from our hostel Tony and Raymond. The drinking continued back at the hostel with some more cheap red wine, by this time Andy from skiing had joined us with a bottle of champagne and as you can imagine things got messy. We ended the night in a bar across the road drinking Caprinas - a Brazilian cocktail that Tony introduced us to, made of sugar cane, rum, lime and vodka. They are pretty strong as we found on the next day spending most of it in bed suffering. Mendoza is a great place to chill and out and drink wine.