Finally we went out to look at the town. It was shut. I have plenty of memories of holidays in continental Europe, where hours were spent wandering around ghost towns just because they like a long lunch. It doesn't happen much in Europe any more, but the tradition seems alive and well in Argentina. Everywhere you could sit down there were people drinking mate from nice cups with bombillas jutting out of them. But everybody seemed to look very depressed; it was almost as bad as India, but when I considered how shabby the town looks, it didn't seem that odd after all. I felt like I was wandering around Clydebank. We were planning to buy some clothes as our clothes shopping was now well overdue, but the only shop we saw opening times for suggested that they were closed for four hours over lunch. We needed something to do in the meantime, because our hostel was a bit out of town and we didn't want to walk back and forth.

Beer

The only places still open were restaurants and bars, so we decided that lunch would do to fill the time. When we saw somewhere offering bife de chorizo for AR$23 we decided this was the place. It seemed a bit more than we should be spending and a bit more than we were expecting, since we had been told that Argentina is cheaper than Chile, but we had also been told that this cut is the best one in the country with the best steaks in the world, so we couldn't resist. Inside we discovered that it was actually a very good deal, because it normally costs AR$35. The meat was amazing: nice thick, juicy steaks. We washed it down with some Malbec wine, an Argentinian cultivar, and I had a local beer. Lunch cost our entire daily budget. Ooops - but it was worth it!

Bife de chorizo

By the time we were finished our lunch, we were so full and tired from the wine that we couldn't be bothered shopping and just returned to the hostel, pledging that the next day would be a full one. Again I was struck by how shabby the town is: the drains are all open, like the poorer parts of Asia, there are really worn-out cars everywhere, and there is no consideration at all given to pedestrians: no crossings, no pedestrian lights, no stopping to let you across. It really seems like they have the American love of the automobile (and truck), in fact most of the old cars are old American ones; it's a bit like Cuba, except the cars are from the 70s instead of the 50s. And they are in much worse condition that the Cuban equivalent.

Dodgy car and drain

I just couldn't get over how different it all was from Chile.

Next morning we arranged to go on a wine tour in the afternoon. The hostel could arrange two different tours: one was Mr Hugo's bicycle wine tour and the other one was in a minibus. The guy working in the hostel told us that the bicycle tours were dangerous, because of people looking for drunk tourists to rob, and Joanne had read somewhere that the vineyards on the cycling route tend not to be as good as on minibus tours. So we booked up for the minibus tour. There would only be two vineyards, which was a bit disappointing, but there was also an olive oil factory. Woo.

In the cellar

Waiting for our tasting...

The Andes in the distance

Another cellar

Yet another cellar!

An expensive wine they teased us with

More wines we weren't allowed to taste

The olive oil tour was actually the best part of the day but, when we decided to buy some unfiltered olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes, we discovered that they didn't take credit cards, which was all I had. We had been told by three different people that everywhere takes credit cards in Argentina, but here is a place on a tour, for goodness' sake – for tourists and they didn't take credit cards. The tour we had signed up for was a “bilingual tour”, but the English seemed to be forgotten about after the introduction. Utter rubbish! Then, just when we thought our day could get no worse, because we were on our way home, the tour guide picked up the microphone and announced that we'd be stopping off at a church. On a wine tour! She explained it was la virgen de vino, the patron saint of wine, but I couldn't have cared less by that point. I wanted my wine! When we got back, we went straight to the supermarket and bought an expensive bottle of wine to make up to ourselves what we had missed out on the tour. I bought myself a nice-looking beer just in case the wine didn't cheer me up.

La Virgen de Vino on the church

Something to do with the Virgen. Who cares?

The area around the wineries was quite pretty

Nice beer

We were tempted to stay an extra day and do a different wine tour, maybe the cycling one, but would it be any different? We decided against it and made our way slowly down to the bus station. Getting a bus in Argentina is not a simple matter: because of the stupid and wasteful freemarket system they have embraced, it is necessary to walk up and down dozens of different companies' desks, asking each how much?, when?, and so on; they don't have menus up telling you that information, and there is no central, impartial information point you can go to, much the same as Thailand. It would have been the same in Chile, but we had chosen the one company with a price up on the way to Valparaiso because it was less than we had expected, but there were only about five people on the bus, and buses leaving every five minutes; what a waste! Our guide book said there were buses every hour to Cordoba, so we hadn't bothered to book. What our guide book had not mentioned, and we learned when we arrived there, is that the buses are every hour, after 9pm, so we were stuck in Mendoza for an extra half day. If we had known we would have had time to do the wine tour before the bus, but now it was too late.

We heaved our bags back to the hostel and asked if the guy on duty minded if we left our stuff. He was very nice and said we could use the internet, shower, make food, or do whatever we wanted. So we went online to change the hostel bookings we had made in Cordoba and Buenos Aires, which now needed to be put back by one day. The hostel in Cordoba was full the day after we had booked, so we just had to drop the first night. We thought this would be OK, since we would probably be leaving there at night as well, so we would have two full days, even if it was only one night. My friend from Cape Town, Andre, had said he'd be able to meet up with us in Uruguay, but the ferry books up well ahead of time, so we booked that as well. This was the most organised we had been since New Zealand.

Taking advantage of our unexpected extra time, we headed out to buy clothes, but didn't find anything we liked. Instead, we ended up sitting down for lunch at a basic looking cafe. We expected food to cost less than we had paid for the bife de chorizo, so I thought we should experiment with how cheap it was safe to go. My lunch was a parilla, or grill, for AR$15, including a glass of wine and a salad. Sounds nice. Joanne went for three slices of pizza for AR$8, but she went for “juice” instead of wine. In Chile we had discovered that actual juice seems impossible to buy; everything they sell as if it is juice is actually nectar which is a disgustingly sweet mix of water, fruit juice, and sugar, but even that seems to be too healthy for most Chileans: probably the most popular drink we saw at breakfast was Coca Cola. In Argentina it was turning out much the same: fizzy drinks everywhere and fruit juice is impossible to buy. Lunch was really horrible. Clearly food wasn't supposed to be as cheap as that, but at least we knew that we had misjudged. Suddenly the bife de chorizo seemed like excellent value.

AR$15 worth of food (plus wine, not shown)

We picked up our bags from the hostel and went to the bus station. Amazingly Salli, the Aussie from the hostels in Valparaiso and Santiago, was getting the same bus as us. She was raving about the fantastic wine tour she and her friends had gone on, had we heard of Mr Hugo's bicycle tours? As much wine as you can drink back at Mr Hugo's house after visiting loads of vineyards. I was raging so much that I was very tempted to get off the bus and stay for an extra day, but we were already falling behind schedule and we didn't have much time in South America. I had to let it go.

More transport, more discomfort. The seats were made for midgets: the edges of the head rest poked into my shoulder blades when the chair was fully upright. Terrible crooning Argentinian music blasted out of speakers directly over our heads. They provide an on-off switch for everybody's lights; why don't they provide one for everybody's speaker? It's madness. Bife de chorizo aside (which is difficult to do because it was so good), Argentina had started off very disappointingly.

written by  The Happy Couple on September 24, 2009 from Mendoza, Argentina
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
Send a Compliment

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you are on miserable, boring mo fo. be thankful for your health, and the fact you were born in a country that enabled you the opportunity to go on such extravagant journeys. next time, do everyone a favour, and stay at home. your comments about not having credit card facilities were laughable.

written by  joss lowe on May 3, 2010

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Praise the lord! :-)

written by  The Happy Couple on July 21, 2010

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Your blog should be titled "My Whine Tour".

Also, I would suugest you refrain from posting pictures of yourself as you are quite difficult to look at.

written by  Jon Marshall on September 5, 2010

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You miserable old cow, sounds like your honeymoon was a blast!

Mendoza is beautiful and everyones seems really happy.

By the way, is your username "The Happy Couple" meant to be ironic???

Danny & Natasha (on our fabulous South American trip)

PS - Currently in Mendoza and having a great time.

written by  Danny Nicholson on October 13, 2011

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