Wine Tour

Santiago, Chile and Mendoza, Argentia
January 15 - 31, 2009

This year we decided to forgo the beach and explore wine country for our annual holiday in the sun. We spent one week in Santiago and one week in Mendoza with a crazy 7 hour bus ride through the Andes.

We booked our trip through the same company that organized our Brazil trip so we were pretty excited that things would go off without a hitch. We flew with LAN Airlines which we can highly recommend. The attendants are nice and the planes were new smell clean. Once we landed in Santiago things started to unravel a bit. Our driver wasn't there to pick us up. We negotiated with a cabbie to take us to our hotel for $25 US. When we went to check-in things went really crazy as we had no reservations and the local tour company had not received our money that we had paid in October. After our initial shock and a few phone calls home to a dead tour company we knew we were on our own. After some hand wringing and cursing we got our act together and decided to rebook our week in Santiago with the Hotel Galerias and take it from there. Rob Hughes was able to send us the info on our bust travel agency and on TICO (the company that insures travellers for this sort of thing). For those who don't know Rob, he works with Lesley and was covering for her back at the office. Once that was settled, we simply rebooked everything from our hotel and decided to enjoy the next two weeks.

Santiago:

Let us start by saying that Chileans are the most like Canadians of any people we have met. They are totally friendly and helpful. We had read that they stare at foreigners, which they do - especially white guys in surf hats in the City. English is spoken quite widely as they learn it in school and are inundated with MTV and other such shows. Santiago has about 4-5 million people so it is a good sized city but not huge. The Metro is unbelievable clean and efficient. It makes our TTC look like it is the product of a banana republic. The City is booming with new construction - including a huge office and high rise sector along with their version of crappy suburban housing tracts. There are more cranes in that City than in Toronto. The food is amazing. Lots of seafood and fish. It was the height of their summer so we had amazing fresh fruit everyday. Prices are roughly equivalent to Toronto so while it is good value, it is not Mexico cheap.

Highlights of the week include: the Diego and Frieda exhibit; going to the central fish market, eating at the outdoor cafes, going to the Bella Visita market, the bus tour to Vina Del Mar and Valparaiso (a city serviced by Funiculars), the exhibit on protests against Pinnochet and checking out the parks. Brad's favourite thing of all was the day trip we took in a pickup truck up to a rustic thermal. After travelling a decent road for an hour we took a mining road for an hour or two to arrive in the middle of nowhere to soak in some lovely hot springs. They were mud based so the big thing to do is to cover yourself in the mud, let it dry and then hop back in to wash it off. It was there that Brad had the most stares from this one woman who was absolutely facinated with us but too shy to speak. The Mountains were huge and of course beautiful. Our guide was a geographer and worked for the government doing EAs on roads. We loved him. We forgot to mention that the weather was over 30 degrees and sunny every day.

BTW, we have no pictures of Santiago because we lost our camera on the bus to Mendoza so you can only imagine the City.

Mendoza

On January 23rd we took a 7 hour bus ride through the Andes to get to Mendoza. The scenary was out of this world. We saw a Volcano and the highest peak in the Americas. The border crossing was strange. We had to leave the bus, get our paper stamped to say we were exiting Chile and then we had to clear Argentine customs. We then had to get back on the bus and off again so they could check our bags. The customs man was teasing Brad when he found his Immodium. There is nothing quite as embarassing as standing in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of strangers and a government official laughing about diarrhea. Never mind the food, stay away from the damned mineral water. Dehydration can be a good thing sometimes.

Once in Mendoza, it was all about wine and food. There is a crew of people in the City that are on their way or coming back from climbing Aconcagua, one of the seven sisters. They are nice people but why do something that killed 7 in January alone. The best place to start a visit to Mendoza is a gringo run place called Vines of Mendoza. They have wines from 50 wineries for tasting. They also put out a newsletter recommending restaurants and Bodegas to visit. We went back one night as they were featuring a wine maker who makes sparkling wines for 5 wineries. That was a fun tasting night. Unlike Niagara, the Bodegas are all locked so you have to make reservations to visit - and you must pass through a security guard to get in. Once in however, they treat you really well. The Bogegas are like modern day castles. They are really lux but with modern architecture. We rented a car and explored the roads which was an adventure without a proper map. We had lunch at two wineries and tastings at another. Salentein was the most interesting as it also included an art gallery. Their wines are gravity fed. All the wineries depend on the melt waters from the Andes mountains so it is a precarious life. Brad wanted to visit the big thermal outside of Mendoza which we did on Sunday. It was like an Argentian White Water Kingdom. It was family day with everyone soaking in the various pools. Lesley was facinated with the men and their barbequing. They get these big charcoal fires going and keep loading on every kind of meat imaginable.

The weather was hot. As one shopkeeper told Brad, the heat is going to be cruel today. At 41 degrees, we wouldn't say cruel but we took advantage of siesta time to hit the hotel pool. All shops close between 1:30 and 4 pm for siesta and they should. The city park is busiest at 11:00 pm when the heat starts to break. You will notice in the pictures, that the streets are tree lined forming a canopy which provides some relief from the sun. The trees are watered through an open canel system which conveys water along all the boulevards.

After a week of eating and drinking and swimming we got back on the bus for the 30 plus hour journey home. We took the bus back through the mountains, then the flight home with one stop over in Miami.

It was a great trip and we are just a bit wiser.

South American Wine Tour