Mendoza (12 - 16 April 2008)
The 20 hour bus journey to Mendoza was not too bad, except for the very unhygienic Israeli girl that sat next to us. My goodness, I always thought that the throat-clearing gargling sound that we heard in Asia could only be mastered by men and Indian women. Well, now I know that Israeli women have apparently also acquired the skill. After a night of her gargling as loud as possible and then spitting her phlegm into a cup, I felt like giving her a thorough lesson in personal hygiene and general manners (Emsie Schoeman hier kom ek!)
Mendoza is known for its wine production. It is a fairly big city with the expected museums, churches and gardens, but the main attraction is the wineries in the surrounding areas.
We arrived in Mendoza on a Sunday morning and took up the offer of one of the touts to view their hotel. These touts have amazing at marketing skills - they can make the crummiest place sound like a palace and they promise all kinds of bells and whistles. We took up the free ride into town to view the hotel, but the close-up view was not satisfactory at all (Hotel 224 can teach these guys some tricks). And so the big search for a hostel began… Mendoza is any traveller’s nightmare - it is overcrowded and has too many very bad budget accommodation options to choose from. At last we decided to look at a place far from the town centre. The old owner was such a nice man that had me wrapped around his little finger in no time and we decided to take a room in the hostel filled with too many Israelis. We just do not learn our lesson, do we?
To make a very long night short: the next morning I had more bedbug bites than I had from all the previous places combined! For some reason unknown, the little buggers love my blood. I was itching and scratching when I told the owner that we are checking out and I was polite enough to show him one of the bedbugs I found in my bed. He said: “but it is dead” pulling up his shoulders in denial. YEH! It is dead because I killed it!!!! What, should I have saved it so that he could add it to his pet-pests collection? To top it all off, one of the Israelis had a midnight feast on the full portion of left-over lasagne that we stored in the fridge! They even had the audacity to drink half of our Sprite and then put the half-empty bottle back into the fridge.
Okay, so we decided to rather pay more and stay at a proper place with absolutely no bedbugs and Israelis. We walked to town to the hostel referred to us by a Dutch couple in Bariloche. Even though the Hostal Confuenza had a bit of a clinical hospital feel to it, it was miraculously clean 
We met up with the Dutch couple, Gerben and Maaike and decided that we would do a bicycle wine-tour together the next day.
We rented four antique bicycles in the little wine-town of Maipu. I am sure something that old has to be an antique! And with a lot of rattling we set of to do some serious wine tasting. We started at the Wine Museum, where we were informed about the Argentinean history of wine making, the wine making process and lastly a taste of the regional speciality - Malbec.
Then we set of to the next winery and then the next and the next…we caught the last winery on our list just before closing time and had a great personal tour and even better wine tasting. Could this have been due to the fact that it was the last of several tastings? We bought two bottles from the last winery to enjoy later that evening.
The next day it was off to Salta. I could not wait to get away from Mendoza, we heard of so many scams and robberies in Mendoza. A guy was mugged in front of our hostel and Gerben and Maaike was also scammed there - a Dutch guy approached them on the street asking for directions to the police office. He told them a big fat lie about him being robbed and he needed to get to Buenos Aires for a new passport etc but he did not have any money and needed to meet with the police to make arrangements. He did not ask them for any money, but because his story sounded so credible they offered him the cash in their wallets. When they wrote the story on their blog, they found out that this was a big scam! Mendoza is not a safe place to travel in and it really had nothing to offer. If it had not been for the surrounding wineries, I would not have visited to start with.
Click on the image below to view the gallery for Mendoza: