Arrived to Mendoza yesterday afternoon around 4pm after taking the day-bus from Santiago through the Andes.
A week ago, prior to heading to Easter Island, as soon as I arrived in Santiago I reserved the front seat in the top floor of the ANDESMAR bus based on recommendations I read on Lonely Planet's Thorntree website. To say the least, this was an excellent decision as not only was the front seat uber-spacious (allowing me to stretch my legs out and lie back almost horizontally when the seat was down, plus it was very wide so no elbow-touching here!) but also had a huge window that looked out onto the beautiful scenery that was about to come....
At first it was the usual Andes scenery: dry/dusty areas with dry grass and little of interest (a lot of the general scenery in Argentina/Chile is like this, from Salta/San Pedro down to Ushaia/Punta Arenas ... which is quite surprising for me as I assumed it would have been a lot greener. Probably areas like Bariloche have the more "typical" Patagonian scenery which I imagine is like Canada's). Soon enough, though, this changed to steep high-rise snow-covered mountains, surrounding us as we drove through glacier-carved valleys and tunnels carved in the mountainside. After crossing into Argentina, the ubiquitous vinyards started appearing...
And this, of course, is my main reason for visiting Mendoza: so I can get completely langered on cheap high-quality red wine.
I found a nice enough hostel in Mendoza called Savigliano Hostel that's giving me a private room with shower for a bargain 65 peso (13 euro) a night including brekkie. Nice to see some good deals after the Chile and Easter Island expense-fest (I think I went through around US$ 700 in total for the whole time I've been in Chile/Easter Island!)
The savings haven't ended there, and I've been noshing up on some more Argentinian beef for next to nothing. For lunch today I had a generous helping of succulent steak/chips/salad as well as glass of wine, ice-cream for desert and coffee all for only 5 euro! Yeah incredible! ... the obession with meat here seems endless. I haven't been hungry enough to go for a full-on parilla just yet, but there's no escaping the meat, even in the condiments: the accompanying sauces had meat chunks in them!
This being Sunday, most places are closed, including the vinyards, so it's (literally) a day of rest and time to update all my unwritten blogs. Mendoza, a typical Argentinian city (wide streets laid out in a grid, with large central plaza) doesn't really have much going for it, but I intend to get very much into the wine-touring tomorrow: take a bus to a small winery village called Maipu and rent a bike for the day, then traverse the 40km circuit of vinyards getting progressively more and more wasted...
I should probably get a helmet.