Snake eyes in Santiago

So first things first.......Leicester in the play offs, there`s an actual surprise! blog on.

Having completed Argentina, we rocked up to Santiago with some partying in mind following our lazy Mendoza lifestyle. Via the wonders of facebook, we had conversed with our travelling chums Cyrille and Derek and booked into the same hostel that they were in. 8pm was the time as we walked through our hostel door, only 3 hours later than we had planned to meet up with our fellow world wonders, but fortunately they were still both at the hostel but literally about to leave for something to eat along with a spanish girl called Helena. Being the kind soles that they are, the agreed to wait a whole 5 minutes for us to drop our bags off and get our things to go out, but they didn`t allow us any more time, even though Jen was desperate for a shower. Might not be so kind after all. So as our showerless selves hummed a bit, we ventured out to a place recommended to us by the hostel for some traditional Chilean cuisine. 

With me and Jen being the only two who`s Spanish was about as good as Joey Barton`s French, we sat back and let the other three order the food........ two plates of the Chilean norm "Chorrillana" (which is a plate full of chips smoothered in onions, egg, sausage, meat, olives and sometimes cheese) with a pitcher of beer. This by the way, is one epic plate of food and I will be attempting to recreate it when I get home. If someone supplies the beer, I´ll cook it up for them!

Suitably filled and following a few beers, we thought the best idea would clearly now be to go on a pub crawl of Santiago......what better way to discover the city?! Rocking up to a karoake bar we paid our entrance fee which got us into 3 bars on route, with a shot in each bar, and then free entry to the club at the end. Entrance also meant that the first hour in the meeting bar, was as much free beer as you could possibly drink so what is the best way to yam beers in a short period of time???? Drinking games of course. So with a lack of playing cards, we played what we could such as the legendary cigarette packet flip game (Loughborough lads will know what I`m on about), and a new game we`d learnt out here involving coins amongst a few others. Did the trick though with plenty of alcohol being consumed. At this point we questioned how much we had drank, as we looked at a flyer of the pub crawl we were on and in big letters it read "Gay pub crawl". Not knowing what we had got ourselves into and whether we were heading to some gay bars, we looked a little closer at the flyer to read that was saturday night`s pub crawl and we were on the friday crawl.

After some free shots and discounted drinks from the first few bars we played some silly games in another one. The guides looked for 3 single guys and 3 single girls but only found 1 male volunteer and 2 girls so being the sports we are me and Jen volunteered and forced our mate Derek to join in too! The game turned out to be a little flirtacious, with the lads putting a shotglass down their pants which the girls had to drink and the girls putting a shot down their cleavage for the lads to drink. Luckily, me and Jen love to play such games anyway so we were pros, but Derek was forced into it (by me) to do this with a total stranger. What fun. I`ve emailed him for the photo but not sure we`ll get it as he refused to get it on facebook! If I do, it will proudly be posted right here.

Not much else to report on the pub crawl night, other than Cyrille pulled one of the pub crawl guides, who was a woman (no mistaken Saturday night pub crawls here).

The following day we were going to go on a free walking tour, however we were too lazy but our mate Cyrille took us on the same tour as he had been on it yesterday! We had a look at a cool church, nuff said about that.

There were some crazy sculptures in the central plaza, this one was a bit freaky and didn`t fail with the customary pigeon sitting on a statue.

On our way to a cool viewpoint we heard some harmonious tunes coming out of a cave. Yes, a random cave in the middle of the city! Following our ears we stumbled into a cave where folk were selling little nic nacs and local things, but the impressive thing was the guy playing tunes on his ocarinas. Now you might not know what an ocarina is (I wouldn`t have either if it weren`t for the legendary N64 game "Zelda, Ocarina of time") but its a small wooden musical instrument with holes allowing you to make a tune with your fingers. Mesmerised by the smooth melodies of a random old guy in a cave, we listened along for a bit and convinced ourselves that we definately needed one of these to recreate such soothing sounds.

Ocarina in pocket, we went onto the viewpoint which we had set out to visit in the first place. It had some cool statues and after waiting for a while for some people to get out the way so our photo would look cool, we got bored cos they were taking freeking ages, so we just took one anyway.

Climbing many sets of staircases, we finally reached the top and got a good view of the city. Sadly, Santiago has a fairly thick smog engulfing the city, probably as it`s such a huge city and theres lots of polution etc, but it meant that the impressive views were somewhat tampered with. If you look closely enough you can just about make out the moutain range in the background, as the city lies in the Chilean central valley (the depression between the Chilean coastal range and the Andes). Don`t think I`ve mentioned it before but the city is swarming with dogs, similar to pretty much all south america cities and we couldn`t work out why there was a dog right at the top of the viewpoint who had bothered to walk all the way up there. Weird.

Cultural activities completed we headed back to the hostel for some drinks and a BBQ. Supposedly starting at 7pm we waited whilst drinking for it to start which would eventually be 10pm. Along with other hostel dwellers, we starved away and could only think of one way to surpress the hunger....more alcohol. By the time we ate we were already pretty tipsy and following food, some bright sole came up with the great idea of drinking games (definately wasn`t me!). This turned out to be one of the funniest nights of travelling so far. Along with Derek and Cyrille we were joined by 3 American`s and after a few drinking games, we came to the ultimate drinking game "ring of fire". Most people will recognise this game, however we played with some rules I had never seen before. New rules meant that if someone was dealt a King, they were the president and could literally tell anyone playing what to do, the 10 card meant that anyone else could tell that person to drink at any time, and if you got an ace, you were snake-eyes meaning that no one could look you in the eyes. The reason this night was so funny was purely down to these hilarious American`s, one of which (called Matt) got super drunk quite early. First off, our mate Derek got snake-eyes and Matt kept looking at him so kept having to drink. Then Matt got snake-eyes and thought it was hilarious and tried any tactic possible to get people to look him in the eyes. He`d get right in your face, or shout your name, or hit the table hard...anything he could with his eyes super wide open. Reading this back, it doesn`t even sound that funny...but it was super hilarious, maybe cos we were all pretty drunk.

Jen got the president card, and after I sent Jen under the umbrella in Mendoza, her first move was to send me behind an easel for a while.....payback isn`t so sweet.

Half way through the game, others were becoming intrigued seeing as we were all in stitches. This lad Danny couldn`t resist so joined in, as soon as we did, we made him sit with his shirt over his head. He soon thought joining in was a mistake, but after a few drinks, he was in stitches with the rest of us.

After drinking all night and getting through everything alcoholic we had (including two more trips out to get even more liquer) we called it a night.

Sunday being a new day, we went out in search of some more cultural activities and went off to see a museum we had read was good. Getting to where it was shown on the map, we were dumfounded that we couldn`t find it, and after 5 minutes of looking we finally saw a tiny sign and found out it was closed. Onto a different museum then, which turned out to be pretty interesting. It had an English newspaper from the 70`s with the cover story being about the Chilean president at the time, but I was more interested to read a small piece also on the frontpage about a bizarre decision for WestHam to drop Bobby Moore against Man U.

Following the museum we visited the fish market which was pretty cool, but we were a bit late so there wasn`t that much out.

Walking back to the hostel we crossed this weird horse statue, which is clearly out of proportion but pretty cool all the same.

The next day we went off to another viewpoint of the city, accessible via this cool funicular.

They bloody love a statue on top of a hill here, and here is one depicting the Virgin Mary.

And the view from the top.......and before you say anything about the hair, I decided that it was a good idea to grow it in following Pique`s decision to shave his off, and no-one has called me Pique since. Pique 8, Rogers 1.

Being a nice day an ice cream was on the cards, which was supposed to be a pointing finger and I was gutted when my finger had broken off in the packet.........

....which Jen obviously found hilarious as hers was intact.

Having eaten out a fair bit, we ventured out to the supermarket to pick up some munch. We fancied some steak as we clearly hadn`t had enough in Argentina and were over the moon to pick up this massive lump of steak which was about the size of my head. Why over the moon? No, not as it was the size of my head, but because some half arsed member of staff had put the weight of it down as 0.002kg, and as they price meat by weight here, that meant that this head sized piece of beef cost us a whole 10 pesos, which equates to 1.4 English pence.

With Jen not able to control her excitment at the check out, she had to look the other way as I saw it pass through as 10 pesos hassle free. If anyone else can say they have spent 1.4p in a better way then let me know!

The next day was our last in Santiago, so we thought we would revisit the fish market seeing as it wasn`t in full swing the first time we went, and it was pretty cool. It stunk though, but still pretty cool.

Thankyou very much Santiago......next stop Valparaiso

Time for some Argentinian wine - with some bikes.......

Horse riding complete and a fresh day in Mendoza leads to the true purpose of our visit, wine tasting. And who can think of a more sensible suggestion than drinking wine all day at various vineyards and getting between these vineyards on a bicycle down a fairly busy road? Apparently not Mendozians (probably not the correct word for a collective of folk from Mendoza....oh well), so off we went on a bus ride to the vineyard road and visited Mr Hugo to rent a bike (who was infamous amongst travellers). We weren`t going to make the same mistake as our last bike ride and miss our stop so we jumped off when fellow cyclers jumped off. Well at least they looked like cyclers and turned out to be, so our first mission of going to the right place was a success.

After Mr Hugo´s friendly welcome (seemed friendly but it was in Spanish, he could have been telling us we were douches for all I know but whatever he was doing he had a smile on his face), we had a look at the map and decided the best idea would be to cycle the to the furthest away vineyard we liked the look of out of about 17 and then make our way back more leisurely after having a few wines. Setting off as just us two we went at Jen`s slow pace as per usual (don`t hurt me when you edit this please Jen - nothing wrong with a leisurely bike ride Jack!) and arrived at the vineyard Familia di Tomaso about 10k from the rental place. After having a little look at the options we decided to skip lunch here and have it at the next place and just go for the wine tasting- Mr Hugo had given us a flyer meaning we got half price wine tasting here which was a bonus. About to enter the building, I turned around to notice two Aussie girls from our hostel rock up on their bikes. So we went in as a foursome for our first Mendoza wine tasting experience. Having no idea what a good wine really tastes like, and also a miniscule experience of red wines, I didn`t really have a clue what the lady was talking about when explaining the wines, even though her English was excellent. "Full body" this, or "hints of red berries" that, all I could taste was wine, so I didn`t faff about with all this smelling and swilling bollocks, straight down the neck it is like any good Loughborough graduate had been trained to do. 

One white wine, two reds and a desert wine later (not full glasses but about 3/4 a small glass), the four of us set back off on our bikes back down the road we had just come from. With our legs still fine with only a bit of wine down us we easily got to the next place, "Tempus Alba" which would turn out to be one of our favourite vineyards of the day. Arriving there to see the vast vineyard, we set our bikes down and a bloke told us we could look around for free, which basically meant looking at some boards with English info first at the vineyard itself, then the cellar and then the fermentation tanks on the way up the stairs to the trying area.

The area would turn out to be a really cool outside decking area where we chilled out in the shade and received our next trio of wines to try. Now I say "try" loosely as this place literally gave us three large wine glasses each, all red except for one rosè which Jen had. Revelling in the joy of plentiful wine the four of us relaxed in the Mendozan heat and had a laugh together. Half way through our wines, I heard a familiar voice say `sweeeeeeet` and I could only see the side profile of the person who had made that sound but I was 90% sure it was another aussie girl that we had met in Ilha Grande, again in Parati and then again in Iguasu on both the Brazilian and Argentian side. I explained to the Aussie`s in current company that we had met this Aussie girl and she always said "sweeeeet", "awwwweeesssommme", "no waaaayyyy" and "coooool" amonsgt other things. The Aussies said that sounded like someone they had met but we thought nothing of it and after finishing up our wines we jumped back on the bikes and onto vineyard number three.

This vineyard was called Mevi and was the only vineyard we went to who promoted the fact it was Malbec day, the biggest wine export of the region. By promoted I mean that they gave us some free grapes used to make the malbec and also a free glass of the stuff. Don`t mind if I do Mevi. Sitting down here we decided to grab some food, with our 10% discount flyer from Mr Hugo and just another glass of wine to accompany the meal instead of getting the taster menu. Entering the room we were surprised to see a girl we knew from Pucon, who we had travelled with to Bariloche. After a quick catch up we sat down to eat only for that Aussie girl I mentioned from the last vineyard to stroll in who turned out to the person I suspected it to be, but randomly was the same girl that the two Aussies had previously met. With a "ohh my godddd" she hugged the other Aussies and catched up. With Jen and I sitting down without her acknowledging us we thought she forgotten who we were seeing as we hadn`t seen her since Brazil, only for her to just say "Oh I know you guys too" after what can only be decribed as canoodling the other girls. Oh well, at least she recognised us.

On our way out we came across yet more familiar faces, the two English blokes that we had met in Puerto Natales, the Navimag, Puerto Varas and Pucon. After a quick catch up and telling the girls we had met them in all of those places we realised we had never even found out their names! Whoops. We did find out though that these two blokes had gone for the tandom bike option, good lads!

Anyway, back as our four winos, we ventured onto vineyard number 4, "Trapiche" which was the biggest and most recommended of all the vineyards in the area due to the fact you got the best tour. With Jen falling behind with the pace again the two Aussie girls were way out infront only for them to cycle on past the turning to Trapiche. Too far out of earshot for my attempted shouting, Jen plonked herself in one spot whilst I had to nail it up the road to catch up with the girls and bring them back to the turning, depicted in this shot.

Back on track we arrived at vineyard number 4 and had to wait a short while for a introcutory video to finish which we had just missed so that we could join the tour from that point on. The video sounded boring anyway so we won that one. Being show around the massive winery we were allowed to drink straight out of one of the old stainless steal caskets, which was pretty cool. The only drawback was that the whole industrial area absolutely wreaked of fermenting grapes.

Holding our breath we got shown around some more and saw all the grapes being carted in aswell as all the skins and stalks being taken away after the juice was extracted. Again we were given some free grapes to try.

Here`s Jen about to eat some of those free grapes, much smaller than those you would normally eat but I guess they are more appropriate for wine production.

With the tour over we went upstairs to recieve our 10th and 11th glasses of wine (bit poo to only get 2 glasses on a wine tasting tour at this place, but was probably a good idea given how much we were drinking). With the guy describing the wines, all I could think was it tasted pretty much exactly the same as any of the other wines we had tasted, and tried to hide when he asked us all which we preferred as I genuinely couldn`t tell between any of them!

With the 11th glass polished off we went back downstairs, held our breath past the stink of fermentation and jumped back on our bikes after posing for a photo.

Done with wine by now, we thought what a great idea it would be to mix it up a little so the four of us went onto our final destination the "Beer Garden". Turned out to be a great shout where we were greeted by the "waitress" (who had some suspicious looking stubble on a rather strong jaw line but lovely painted red nails) who served us up a nice empanada and a beer each. Sitting down over our beer we all agreed that this "waitress" was infact a cross dressing man!

Half way through our beer, the two English blokes rocked up so we got them to sit with us. The cunning Aussies had hatched a plan to ask their names if we met them again which they did. So now our foursome was joined by the two Brits....Darren and Charlie. Pretending that we had always known their names we had a good chat finding out that they went to Trapiche also and finished up to find some blokes trying out their tandom bike, resulting in one bloke loosing control and riding into a wall who ended up going to hospital needing stitches. Lesson to be learnt kids, don`t jump on a random`s tandom bike with no tandom bike experience!

The two Aussie girls shot off early to get their bike back leaving me to finish of my drink as well as most of Jen`s and set off back with Darren and Charlie. Here they are on their tandom bike which provided comical scenes for me and Jen as they had to count down when they would start cycling to get going!

With our final drink of the tour complete we went back to Mr Hugo`s where a juice and a beeming face was waiting for us! Then we jumped back on the bus to the hostel and accidentally got off at the wrong place, which was a pretty big accident considering we were so far out of place we were off the city centre map we had. Not to fear though, Jack`s amazing Spanish as I manged to get some info of a local and we walked back for 20 minutes, as Jen finally had a smile return to her face when finding a road name on our map! Arriving back at the hostel we found they had put on a free wine tasting tour in the communal area. Not having had enogh free wine throughout the day we sat down for wines number 12 and 13 with a woman who actually knew what she was talking about and told us to smell the wine first, then swish it around and smell it to release aromas, then taste a little bit, then a little more and swill it round the mouth, then drink it from there. To be honest I thought that was all rubbish so I drank as I pleased. We then went out for an awesome burger at an Irish bar accompanied by a litre of beer with Kathryn who had recovered from her horse allergy the day before. Burger munched we strolled back to the hostel.

With crazy wine woman out the way we reverted to what we knew best, drinking games with the other hostel folk. Playing a new game where one person could tell anyone what to do, and wouldn`t you know it, I was that lucky person, I sent Jen to play standing under a closed big garden umbrella, another America bloke to go sit by her feet, Kathyrn to sit there with a pack of fags on her head and made another girl plank on the end of the table. I like this game! The America guy would end up getting so drunk that he got up and never came back again, only to turn up the next day without a clue as to what happened the day before. Funny thing was, it was his game and I got to be the guy who told people what to do. Moral of story is, don`t challenge Jackie to drinking games......he will win!

With Mendoza well and truely ticked, we jumped on another bus to cross the Chilean border (which was high up in the mountains),  which would end up taking forever, taking us off the bus, scanning all bags, patting us down, sniffer dogs out. Turns out you can`t take any food products over the border (which Jack let me remind you we already knew!). Took well over an hour and at one point we saw a woman actually having a super serious panic attack, which was never nice to see. Can`t have been that bad loosing her onion at the border (that`s not actually what happened, no idea what set her off!) In other news the altitude made our pack of crisps turn into a balloon which I accidentally sat on causing it to explode and the bottle cap flew off our bottle of coke when Jen opened it, almost hitting some guy a few seats down the bus. Bare that in mind if you ever get to a high altitute kids!

Finallly back on the bus and on our way in Chile, we weren`t so impressed to see a ridiculous queue winding down the mountain, which ended up taking 3 hours. What fun.

Time for some Argentinean wine - with some horses.....

Thanks to a certain someone forcefully making me catch up on the blog following a facebook conversation where I confessed I was 6 places ahead of the last blog, here I am sitting at a computer screen when I could be out watching wild sea lions perched on rocks literally about a metre below our feet at a peer, or going to a museum to see the world`s oldest mummies (interestingly, the ancient Chilean`s mummified their dead around 3000 years before Egypt yet Egypt are the ones who get all the credit)....but I guess I`ll get to doing all that tomorrow, cos this blog is more important apparently. Love you long time Jess! Get back to your `reading`! (tee hee)

So.................chocolates munched we said goodbye to Bariloche and made our way to our final stop in Argentina, Mendoza. Clearly we had planned well as Mendoza is Argentina`s wine region, so a good place to see off Argentina. Mendoza actually produces 70% of the 1.5 billion litres of Argentinean wine production (no I didn`t learn that from a tour, I just got that from Wikipedia, but even if that`s not true, we did learn that it produces a lot of wine).

Arriving really early morning in however meant that that wine would have to wait. But we were ecstatic to be offered eggs and pancakes for breakfast from the hostel which was a welcome break from the normal bread, jams and fruit. As we couldn`t check in yet, we played cards until we could and then we ventured out into town and found some fountains where they had decided to colour the water pink.

More importantly, we came across a cafe which upon first glance looked like a Cafe Nero we would find in the UK, but out here they have their heads screwed on right and named it wisely.

After noticing the hostel offered BBQ for about 11 quid we turned it down to save up for our wine fund and got a boring pasta. Sitting with the other hostel folk whilst they ate their BBQ food, we made the right choice, as they got about 4 tiny bits of meat, and we all got as much free wine as we wanted courtesy of the hostel, so cheap pasta was the way forward.

The next day we opted for an excursion that I would excel in.....sunset horseback riding. Arriving at the ranch I realised I wasn`t going to be quite as good as I thought as I petted what I thought was my horse.

After being redirected to an actual horse which I would be riding, I was keen to hop onto `Vino Tinto` meaning `red wine`, apt for both the wine region and my love of alcohol............

...I succeeded with no help whatsoever as this picture demonstrates......no this guy didn`t help me at all.

Jen successfully got onto her horse `Zorro`, everything was going way too swimmingly.

How hard could it be with this little kid prancing about on his horse without a care in the world.

After a quick test run around to get to know our horse and attempt to control it, we set off in our little group of five (one girl we knew from the hostel named Kathryn and another couple we just met, one of which had worked with horses for 10 years), led by our instructor James Franco.

Horse riding was pretty cool, we followed the instructor through a dirt track through the Argentinean mountains. For some reason, Jen had a crap horse (even though she`ll tell you Zorro was awesome - yes he was awesome actually, he didn´t bow down to peer pressure to be speedy - aka crap - stop editing my editing Jack - only when you admit Zorro was poo - he was lovely - noooottttt - stop it - ok) and it just seemed to plod along at its own pace. You can see the gap between the others forming. 

With my horse at the back of the group apparently wanting to go faster, he was literally with his head up Jen`s horses arse. I didn`t mind so much as I was on the Vino Tinto`s back and not up Zorro`s arse however that situation quickly changed as Zorro decided to cock his tail and let a massive poo out in Vino Tinto`s face. Luckily I saw it coming with the cocking of the tail and managed to guide Vino away, didn`t stop him hurrying back up to the arse again afterwards though.

With Zorro`s poo both fresh in my mind and on the floor, I hung back a bit to attempt to get some artistic photos, mainly of our silhouette.

Getting to a resting point, our instructor checked all our saddles as we would climb a steep hill to get a good view.

With Jen`s horse refusing to do anything that Jen asked it to along the way,  I decided to play around a bit with my horse seeing as mine actually did what I told it to. I found it pretty funny too, showboating doing circles. Tee hee.

Upon getting to the top there were pretty cool views and the instructor told us a bit about the wildlife. At one point he was talking about a purple vulture and as soon as he did, one literally flew about 10 metres above our heads so that was pretty cool.

Back on the horses and after Jen wasn`t too impressed that the instructor made all the horses speed up a bit, we arrived at the ranch for a BBQ. Jen gave Zorro a pat (even though he sucked) and said her goodbyes.

Clearly a long day for the horses, out came the piss, as pretty much all of them proceeded to take the opportunity to relief themselves systematically.

....Onto the BBQ, with Juan our chef showing off a pretty good chunk of meat. Argentinean BBQ`s are pretty cool, they only use wood, no coal, and only use the embers of the wood so you get a proper BBQ taste.

Accompanying the BBQ was the mandatory Mendoza wine, 5 litres to be precise between the group, meaning almost a litre each after the instructor and chef got in on the action.

Food done, and with wine in hand, our instructor James Franco (not really called that if you were wondering that, but he looked like him even though this picture doesn't really show it, but trust me, in person he was James Franco) cracked out some tunes on the guitar in English and Spanish with some funky remixes somehow incorporating Elvis with Barbie girl.

After a good old laugh we were all then treated to our driver playing the guitar, who to our surprise was an actual Argentinean folk music player and it was awesome even though we couldn`t understand a word he was saying. With my limited Spanish knowledge it sounded at one point to me as if he were saying `I can kill the whale`, turns out that wasn`t what he was saying at all!

After a long old day we went back to the hostel where Kathryn had to go to bed after she realised she was actually allergic to horses! Picked the wrong excursion there eh Kathryn?!

Oh and 10 points to Matt Smith-Lilley for identifying the bird of prey as a Caracara from the last blog. Probably could have thought of something better to do but fair play all the same.

More bikes and lots of chocolate

With Jen now hobbling around with her gammy leg, we were done with Chile for a bit so we crossed back over to Argentina and thought that we would chill out for a bit in Bariloche, even though we were going back down south slightly when we were heading north. Chocolate and beers were on the agenda so we were looking forward to enjoying the lazy life.

There was no direct route to Bariloche from Pucon so we needed to stop off for a few hours at a place called San Martin. Pretty cool place, all to report from here is that a bloke we climbed the volcano with left his ukulele on the bus and ran back to get it (successfully) and we also went to an Irish bar which was ridiculously overpriced. It was also super rainy so got drenche before the  next bus ride. Upon getting to our hostel in Bariloche after the second bus journey, late at night there suprisingly wasn´t really a lot going on.....a nice hostel with a nice dude on reception but no one about so we got an eatly night.

Getting up the next morning, again, there wasn´t really much going on, no one about. Thinking we had booked a dud hostel, we ventured out into the town on our own in search of chocolates! Walking down our road we came across a road full of trees which people had given knitted outfits which was pretty cool.

There was also a pretty cool central area where some dude had carved out sculptures from wood.

But wood to us was boring, the excitement was in the chocolate and we weren´t dissappointed! Walking around town we came to a whole bunch of chocolate shops, which were absolutely massive. Imagine a shop such as your local WHSmith or something similary sized. One floor of WHSmith was the same as this chocolate shop, absolutely massive. We´d never seen so much chocolate in one place. With giddy faces we strolled around and decided what to have which was tricky as it all looked amazing.

We did finally decide thought and with sketchy Spanish we tried to order, mainly with pointing. Luckily the woman spoke pretty good English so it was all good. Collecting up our chocolates, we went and scoffed them all straight away with a view of the lake and mountains. They were ace if you were wondering. Some of the best chocolate I´d ever sampled.

With the chocolate fix satisfied we went back to the hostel and planned our evening, which just so happened to be munching on some steak as we had agreed this was the last of many steaks we would eat in Argentina. Arriving at Alberto´s, a reputable steakhouse in Bariloche and one talked about by almost every traveller who had been to Bariloche we ordered up some steak, chorizo sausage, blood sausage and chips (and mandatory wine). What came out was out of this world. First up the chorizo and blood sausage to wet our appetites which were incredible in themselves but nothing in comparison to the main. The steak was literally rhe best thing I had ever tasted and it was accompanied by the biggest moutain of chips you´d ever see. We didn´t know what to do with them!

Steak munched, and with stuffed bellies I joined Jen in waddling back to the hostel. Next day was another lazy one, so not much to report. With guilt setting in that we should actually do something productive with our time here so we organised a bike ride the following day with the two other girls in our room. The bike circuit was a bit out of town so we hopped on a bus. After half an hour I saw a bike rental place out the window thinking nothing of it as I thought there would be a few. Turns out that was the only one and 10 more minutes on the bus we realised we had gone too far and had to jump off there and hike back. Good start! Getting back to the bike rental place we sorted everything out and set off on our merry way. The views were cool. mountains in the backdrop of forested areas.

Once again the bike ride turned into a bit of a hassle, with a lot of the "biking" being walked by Jen and another girl from the room. I decided to bike the whole thing just so I could claim I had so biked on ahead and then waited for the others to catch up with their pushing tactics so at least I can claim I biked the whole 27k circuit.

Some more awesome views looking over the lake....

Getting the the highest point we thought we would take a sneaky break (we had to wear the bibs and helmet if you were gonna say anything!)

At this point there was a cool moment where we spotted a bird of prey just chilling out on the road. 10 points if you can identify the bird as we couldn´t! Anyway this majestic chap wasn´t scared of us and I was able to get right up close to it and take this cool shot.

With some easy downhills from here out we could take our time and take in the views.....

Coming across some amazingly blue water we left the road and stopped for our packed lunch by the river and lake.

Riding on after lunch we smashed a lot of it out the way, only for me and Jen to look back and realise our roommate Kathryn was no where to be seen. She wasn´t the fittest bless her and was doing more pushing than Jen so we were a bit worried as to where she might be. Stopping for a moment some local bloke pulled over and ranted some Spanish at us, all we understood was "Chica" (meaning "girl) so I left Jen there and cycled back to check on Katheryn. Turns out she got cramp and was sat cross legged on the side of the road. After a short recuperation period she got back on her way and we completed the circuit. 

What better way than to celebrate with a good old drink, so we had some beers at the microbrewery along with some food at about 11.30pm so we were obviously starving. I ordered trout as it´s supposedly a local dish. Big mistake as my dish was mainly bones. I was tempted to ask if any fish came with my bones, but I just ate Jen´s left overs and had more beer making me content!

The next day we thought we better smash some more chocolates seeing as we were off soon. So we went to another 2 chocolate places and got a bag from each which we would eat during the day and save some for the bus and the next destination, the wine region of Mendoza (cos we all know wine and chocolates are a great match)