Mendoza, Argentina
Wine Country
March 14, 2008
Wine is fine, but whiskey's quicker
- Ozzy Osbourne
Mendoza seemed like a very pleasant city; one of those places that are very nice to live in but don´t really offer much to the tourist. Sure there are a hundred little wineries nearby but other than that and a few museums there really wasn´t much to do in the city. The first day I intended to go visit some of the wineries with some other people I met at the hostel but we got a late start and the wineries all closed at around 6pm so we had to abort the plan. Instead, we walked around the city and decided to each buy a few bottles of wine and have our own wine tasting. It was quite fun and it turned out to be much cheaper and easier than visiting all the wineries.
To the west of Mendoza there are lots of beautiful things to see including a few lakes; Aconcagua, the tallest mountain outside of the Himalayas; and Puente del Inca, a naturally made bridge. Since I was going to be heading that way en route back to Chile and Santiago I decided to skip the all-day 12-hour tours and see those things on my own. That left one more day of wandering around Mendoza and hanging out at the sidewalk cafes watching the people walk by. After a very lame St. Patrick’s Day celebration in a place called Irish Bar, not that I had expected much given the location and the name, I caught a bus to Puente del Inca, about 200 km west of Mendoza.