Steak and Wine

December 3-13, 2007

Unbeknown to our parents, our wild world wide whirl wind adventure was winding down. We told them we were arriving home on the 15 January when we actually had a ticket for 15 December. Hehe, we are cheeky!

We thought there would be no better way to spend our last week than by sitting around in Argentina drinking copious amounts of world class wine and eating as much of the best steak in the world as possible.

Arriving in Salta in the north of Argentina, from a brief stay in Chile and a longer stay in Bolivia, it was almost like we were arriving home. This was a good feeling. Some people say that when you arrive in Salta, you feel as if you could be in Paris or another big European city. We wouldn't go that far. It still felt very Argentinian, but there were some very stylish and grand, old buildings that would have blended into the Parisian landscape very easily.

We stayed in a quiet hostel and did very little while we were in Salta. A lot of our time was spent wandering the streets, dodging the frequent protests which were mostly pretty jovial, musical displays and made up of mostly young participants. We did a small bit of shopping to help fill the very small gaps in our two new bags. We also enjoyed some delicious restaurants getting into the Quilmes, the wine, empanadas, tamales and steak of course! Our most active expidition was up a hill on a chair lift which gives you a great view of Salta. And we spent an hour in a funky little history museum with some cool, old wagons and some guns!

We were pretty excited about our last long haul bus journey in Argentina from Salta to Mendoza. But it was a bit below the usual high standard that we'd grown accustomed to and a bit disappointing. But we did travel with some friends we'd met in La Paz and we went out for a nice dinner together on the day we arrived in Mendoza.

The Mendoza region is responsible for 70% of Argentina's wine and it has a well deserved world wide reputation. It is also situated at the base of South America's tallest peak, Aconcagua (6962m) and is popular for trekking, climbing rafting and the rest.

It didn't take us long to decide that Mendoza is a place where we could easily live if only our espanol was mejor! It feels a bit like a big country town, has a great vibe and plenty of good scenery. And it was a perfect place for us to chill for our last week overseas.

We stayed at a very nice hostel. We could've gone all out and got a swish hotel room but decided to save our splurging for the food and wine!

One day we woke up and one of us said to the other, "I don't feel like doing much today. Do you want to just go and find a nice place and sit and drink wine and eat good food all day?" Yep! To be honest, most of our days in Mendoza we did exactly this, plus maybe a small amount of shopping or walking around, checkin gout the park or whatever else looked good on the day.

We ran into Irish Mark one day and joined him and his Irish friend Keiran for a session of steak and wine. We were joined for dinner by a Canadian bloke one night who was at the opposite end of his travels to us. We also met a lovely couple from Sydney who sat next to us at lunch one day. We ended up joining tables and they shouted us a bottle of wine to help celebrate our last day in South America.

We found some new favourite meat restaurants. Sr Buque and Don Marios. Truth is that every traveller you meet has their own 'amazing' steak experience and thinks they've found 'the' best steak restaurant in Argentina. But it's so good everywhere! And so cheap everywhere!

Argentina is one of our favourite countries in the world. We love it! For something to do while we were drinking one day, we made a 'favourites' list of different things during our travels. Argentina made the top 3 for both of us in our favourite countries. Probably helped that we were sitting there in the beautiful, cloudless weather that Mendoza treated us with for a week and we were sipping on their wine and digesting their beautiful bife de chorizo.

Our one 'active' day in Mendoza was spent doing a wine tour on bikes. We caught a local bus about an hour out of town and hired a couple of bikes for pretty much nothing and rode around to a handful of different wineries. We were given a tour around one winery which has been converted into a national heritage site. It was built in 1869 and used bricks and materials imported from Europe (because they didn't exist in Argentina at the time) to build special earthquake proof fermentation vats. They use the vats these days to store bottles of wine during the aging process.

They're a bit different over here in that we had to pay at most places for our tastings but we were also given pretty decent amounts.

Did we mention the weather was beautiful? For this blog entry really we could've got away with saying good wine, brilliant steaks, heaps of fun. The end! That'll do!