Sweet Mendoza.. wubwubwubwubwubwubwub (now with 100% more photos)

Just a brief note for parental units before reading this, a) we are fine, b) Nick and I didn't do anything too stupid so please don't stress, c) Dad you would have loved it...Party week!

As soon as we arrived in Mendoza over a week ago it looked pretty cool,we met a fake New Zealander (originally from England) and got a taxi together to our hostel, the hostel was great and had a pool surrounded by beautiful people so we were happy and got into the BBQ spirit instantly. We bumped into a bunch of "gap brats" 18 year old gap year students who had more money than sense, plums in their mouth, and zero charm, anyway they seemed to love Nick and I despite our best attemps to be rude to them whenever possible. After two nights at our hostel we moved on to another down the road and they followed us there!

When Nick and I arrived at the new hostel we bumped into our friends we met in Bariloche! the huge group of Californians, who seemed delighted to see us and vice versa, we instantly agreed to go on a wine tour of Mendoza and I ran down the road to let Sophs know we now had a party of 10 and that she was going to get a party over the next couple of days and quite possibly the sex that she was longing for, (by the way she is 32 looking 25!) So the huge group of us got a bus to where we rented bikes and began the wine tour, it was a brilliant day, really hot, lots of wine and cycling, bearing in mind how un coordinated i can be once pissed it was hillarious and i think we all managed to injure ourselves in one way or another be it going over the handle bars, wearing down our crotches with the bike seats, or falling off our bikes in odd ways.

We arrived home after the tour having got lost several times whilst on it, and drank a stupid amount at the hostel and did more zoidberg impressions than you thought were ever possible.

Another great thing about Mendoza was the fact that Emily was there (old house mate) and Dana the Canadian we had been stalking for a while. Emily bumped into us on a night out with Dana and made us feel loved and we went out twice them which was cool. Mendoza has a beautiful tree lined lake and glowing light display at night which looks like a magic mushroom and a cool night market just to show we did actually step out of the hostel despite our week of hangovers.

Various haircuts took place at the hostel, we got rid of Phil's hair and gave him a hawk and Sarah (skunk) cut nick's hair which was a bit of a disaster and I have just fixed it, he looks hot again now. The American's sure know how to do a BBQ and we had several whilst at the hostel each more impressive than the next with more alcohol than the last, and with a smeg head called Jessie providing members of the group with larger and larger quantities of coke, ending badly for some.

Oh and I fell off a bus... they don't fully stop so you get off whilst they are moving I missed judged it and am a bit bruised but I rolled quite a long way in an Indiana Jones esc fashion which was cool. There were several roberies at the hostel which we managed to avoid but quite a lot of people got hit.

The main event of the week has to be our road trip up into the mountains. We rented a van for ten of us which Nick and Seabass drove. We had the ipod blaring, good food, some wine, and Jeff had a fuck off jar of pot that people slowly made their way through. Unfortunately for us there were random police checks along the road and we got pulled over. Skunk speaks fantastic spanish and is very pretty and sweet which helped, he was furious that the van smelt of Alcohol (luckily this had been thrown out earlier) but also that we didn't have our passpots on us, photocopies apparently were not good enough. We had been swimming in a lake earlier and Lonnie, Skunk and Soph all had tribal style clay faces which he didn't seem impressed by at all. After making us stand outside the van he began to check through it, looking through bags, taking off pannels and generally scaring the shit out of us. Sarah did a great job of looking perplexed and when he asked to check the ipod speakers and Run DMC's "Tricky" came booming out he actually broke a smile and some how we got away without him finding the pot. For some stupid ass reason Jeff decided before we got to another police check to swollow the weed rather than chuck it away or anything, he was not a happy bunny later (nick: methinks he was telling porkies - he would have been even more of a mess had he actually eaten it!) Anyway we got to the mountains saw some beautiful views and had a great time, amazed by the fact we escaped a 2 year jail sentence, but apparently most Argentinians don't know what pot looks like, not that we really want to risk it.

Anyway our last few days were spent relaxing and having more BBQ's and more alcohol, we have some great pictures which we can't upload at the moment but I will do so when possible (nick - done!)

Soph has now come with us up north to Salta and we are basically bumming here until we can get to Bolivia in a few days wooohoooo! and there we will hopefully run into someold friends again.

Take care

Flossie

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