While Patagonia was stunning and richly rewarding, i have been left a little cold by the rest of Argentina so far. Buenos Aires suffered - i suspect - from "we're coming here again in 10 months, so no need to everything now" syndrome. This quickly turned into doing pretty much nothing for far too many days in a row. The futbol season was over, so that couldn't even distract us. Although outside the Boca Stadium, a fat man with a moustache - bearing absolutely no resemblance to Maradona - selling "fotos con el Diez" did keep me amused for an hour or so. Cordoba was fine. "Nice" almost, but seemingly embarrassed by its history and looking to the future a little too vigorously. Every woman in the place seemed to be pregnant, as though some sort of coral spawning type event had taken place in the town some seven months previously, and every fertile female ended up with child.
Mendoza, however, is wonderful. Lazy if you want it, without being boring. Active, if you want it, without requiring you to scale mountains or white-water raft. And best of all, it is wine country. And Jesus do they know how to look after their tourists. In a village called Maipu (some 45 minutes out of town on the bus) they encourage you to get on two wheels (motorised or not, at your discretion) to spend a day winery hopping. This is exactly what we do, renting bikes from somebody called Mr. Hugo (who gives you a glass of wine while he completes the paperwork, no matter what time you arrive). He then points out on a map the closest five or six wineries (all within 2 kilometres of his shop). He gives you price for tastings (accompanied by a very honest assessment of the generosity of the winemaker), so you can calculate which ones will get you most drunk for your peso. He indicates the local "beer garden" (in case you get sick of wine), and finally tells you that the wineries all close at 6, and that from 6:30 until 9 there is free wine at his shop for everyone who rented a bike from him. The day has an unmatched ugliness potential.
To mitigate this, we devise a strategy to essentially do the opposite of what everybody else is likely to. We visit three wineries, our first - the furthest from the bike rental shop - we have to ourselves for an hour and a half, before slowly making our way back to base, encountering more and more tourists as we get closer. Drunk cycling (or mopeding if you so choose) might be an issue here you see, what with all the English and Irish backpackers lorrying free wine into themselves, but - in a stroke of policing genius - they have established a whole division of the local constabulary tasked with following cyclists around from winery to winery, making sure that, as they get more and more sozzled in the harsh Mendocino sun, they are kept safe. This involves, but is not limited to: stopping traffic to give cyclists right of way, even the wrong way on one-way streets; escorting weaving cyclists through potentially hazardous roundabouts; and best of all, providing a free taxi service if the cycling becomes too much after a long afternoon imbibing. This may be the greatest use of a Guard's time ever invented, and i think it should be looked at as an add-on for cycling pub crawls of Dublin.
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