Mendoza - 4.5 litres of wine, 3 Amigos, one night

I wake up for the checkout of Tango Hostel at 10, with 2 hours sleep under my belt. Put a call into Mummy, to attempt to sort out this mess with our missed flight. Apparently STA Travel say that BA can potentially cancel our remaining flights (all 8) as we have breached our contract. Panic sets in, but i have a backup plan. I will carry on travelling South America, go up to North America through Mexico and travel round there until Christmas, no flights needed! If i run out of money i'll become a croupier in Las Vegas. Luckily, it doesnt come to that and super Simon comes to the rescue, calls Quantas at the Argentinian HQ and explains the situation. All sorted! Close call, but now we have to make our own way to Santiago - a 13hr bus journey.

We book the bus to leave that evening. There was me thinking it would be a stagecoach quality bus smelling of wee, with chewing gum ridden seats, how wrong i was. It turns out CATA run a luxury double decker bus, with sleeper seats as big as a single bed, meals, champagne, films and music. Ive never been so excited to get on a bus in my life (note to self, send pictures to stagecoach HQ in the UK and suggest these in Basingstoke). So it wasn't that bad after all missing the flight, as now we are in a small town called Mendoza, 5hrs East of Santiago on the foot of the Andes mountains.

Mendosa is a huge contrast from the hustle & bustle of Buenos Aires, a nice change. We dump our bags at the new hostel Campo Base 2, its dead but were not bothered and set off to explore our new home. Walk to Independencia park & the San Martin park, 'one of the most beautiful in South America' as the lonely planet guide states.

Lake in front of the Andes, Parque San Martin

Go shopping for our next few days at the supermarket, end up buying mainly alcohol. A 4.5 litre bottle of red wine to be precise. I come up with the genius idea of livening up the hostel the next evening by attempting to polish off the whole bottle in one night, just the three Amigos! We also bought a bottle of chocolate liquer that looked 'like Jiz' as Martin kindly put it. It did surprisingly taste good dispite the nickname.

Horse riding in the Andes the next morning stopped us from having a wild one the night before. Pretty scared of horses, but did it anyway, it was an amazing experience.

Yeeeeehhaaaaaaa

Lesson learnt, im a good rider ;-) Yeeeeeehhhaaaaaaaa.

The four Amigo´s

When we got back, started climbing the mountain that was the 4.5 litre wine bottle, seemed like a good idea at the time. What happened between the hours 6 and 12, your guess is as good as mine. We did reach the peak though, and documented our mammoth event with photos throughout the night. Alot of cards were played, even a comedy trip to the local supermarket took place, a small fight between the three amigos and the meeting of an Isreali called Dave happened, so im told.

Managed not to be sick, (mum, i miss not ringing the doorbell at 3 in the morning t get in, 'here i am!!!')

written by  Vegtibbles on June 4, 2006 from Mendoza, Argentina
from the travel blog: The Crazy Adventures of the Tibbler
tagged YeeeeeeeHaaaaaa
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