Mendoza, Argentina

We spent four days in Mendoza, and it was really nice. It was a great change of pace, scenery, and price (Argentina is 3x cheaper than Chile) compared to Santiago. Mendoza has a population of 110,00, so it has a small town feel. After a 6-hour bus ride, and an additional 2.5 hours going through the border we arrived in the town. The bus ride was beautiful with 90% of it going through the Andes. Once we entered the city limits it was easy to see that America has more influence over Argentina. We saw a Microtel Inn and Suites, many different old American cars, and good ol’ Wal-Mart. The hostel we stayed at was an old colonial house, so it was kind of surreal to wake up early in the morning and have total quietness outside, but then a horse trotting by would break the silence. It is definitely not the majority, but many people there still use a horse and cart to do their business around town. We walked around most of the town’s central and at 2:00 in the afternoon people just close up their shops and take a lunch until 5:00pm. Every business seemed to do this except the cafes. It seems that most people use this time to exercise, since we seen many gyms and the park was full of people running, swimming, biking, canoeing, playing tennis, and more. The park was extremely nice with giant trees, a lake in the middle, and an amazing view of the mountains.
The major business of Mendoza is vineyards. On the third day we went on a winery tour. We toured two wineries, an olive oil factory, and a liquor/chocolate factory. Our favorite part was the tastings; the talking part could get kind of boring. The wineries were beautiful though. Our favorite was an organic winery that is ran by a family. There are 1500 wineries in Argentina, but only 8 are organic. They said that people in Argentina do not understand the benefits of organic and just see that it costs more, so this is why 90% of the winery’s production is exported to other countries.
Here are some pictures:
Route 60 to Mendoza. It was kind of scary at times how close the bus was to the edge.

We made it to the Argentina border crossing. It was a long process since approximately 6 buses were in front of us. All of us had to get off when it was our turn, have our passport stamped, get back on the bus for a while, get off the bus again and have the guards look in our bag, and then we were done.

Beautiful lake right outside the Argentina border.

Rainy mountains outside Mendoza

Our hostel

Downtown Mendoza

Parque San Martin. This is where so many people were exercising. We think the big building is like a country club.

The basement of a winery with the huge barrels where we had a wine tasting, but the picture didn´t come out too well.

Many, many wine bottles

Grapes on the vine at the organic winery

The windy road back to Santiago. The sad thing is we had already gone down 4 or 5 tiers before I took the picture. This part of the road made Nick car sick.