The main attraction is obviously all the wineries about 15km out of town, so we planned on hiring bikes and riding around them all getting sozzled and trying not to fall off/get hit by cars. But we got talking to Nick, Jess and Jake, 3 Americans who were staying at the hostel, and they'd decided to drive around the wineries so we were welcome to join them. Sounded good to us. Nick spoke Spanish so he sweet talked an information centre girl into circling all the free wineries on the map for us which was helpful until we lost the map. We ended up going to 2 wineries - one flash one where we paid for a tour and tasting of 3 wines, and one where the tour was free but we opted to skip it and sneakily join onto a group who'd just finished in order to get the free tasting. Genius.
We finished off at an olive oil factory where they also made tapenades, sweet marmalades, liquers and chocolate. And we got to taste them all. By then most places were closing so we headed back to the hostel to cook an asado and drink lots of beer. Perfect end to a great day.
After about 3 days we decided to move on. We'd checked out and as we were leaving Kurt got talking to the hostel owner about our plans to try and get some work at a hostel in Cordoba. He'd just bought the place a month earlier and had a lot of work he wanted done, so he said he'd be happy for us to stay in exchange for working there. So we unpacked our bags and that was home for the next 4 weeks or so. We had two main jobs - looking after the hostel when the others weren't there which was really just letting people in and answering the phone, and painting. And we did a pretty good job at painting if I do say so myself.
Cristian, the owner, was pretty generous as he organised free Spanish lessons for us and also a tour of the mountains which is the other tourist thing to do in Mendoza. But it was shit so we were glad we didn't have to pay for it because we would've been really pissed off if we'd forked out $45 each. We had initially said we'd stay until early February, but we realised we'd need more time to go through Cordoba and Uruguay before we were due in Brazil, so we headed off at the end of January. Thanks for having us Mendoza.
Our last stop in Argentina (for now) was Cordoba. It was quite a nice city so we spent 4 days just chilling out, wandering around checking out the sights which was mainly architecture.
We attempted to go to a natural science museum several times over a couple of days, but it was closed due to electricity problems. Bugger. Our other less than successful outing was to the nearby town of Alta Gracia, which is where Che Guevara lived as a child. His old childhood home is now a museum so we wanted to check it out. We'd read online that it cost about $5 to get in, however that wasn't even close. Try closer to $20. Inflation's a bitch huh? We couldn't justify spending $40 for a museum that was literally just a house, so we got some nice photos of the outside.
We did hit the jackpot at the biggest asado restaurant in Argentina - it would've seated about 1,000 and had a river running through it. No shit. And it was an all you can eat buffet of awesome asado meats, freshly cooked pasta to order, and tray after tray of every food you can imagine. Oh, and there was a separate dessert buffet station too. All for only about $13. That's what I'm talking about.
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