Mendoza - Part 2

After our trips to the wineries and high into the Andes mountains, we decided to relax for a day. The place we stayed at was the Lao Hostel in Mendoza, supposedly voted South America's best hostel in the past. Temperatures during the day were incredibly hot, up to 40 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit). Sorry, we know you guys are currently dealing with cold weather and snow in the U.S. and Germany... ;-)

In the evening, we shared a few bottles of wine at the pool with a bunch of crazy French and French-Canadian folks. That's the nice thing about staying at a hostel - you typically meet other travelers and it never gets boring.

Next was an action day again, when a tour bus picked us up early in the morning for a two-hour ride to their home base at the Rio Mendoza.

In the morning, we tried out their zipline across the river.

In case you haven't done this before, try it out some time, it's a lot of fun! Basically they provide you with a harness and a helmet, and you slide along a thick wire to the other side.

They had three zip lines in total, one to get to the other side and two back - one of them easy, the other a little more steep.

So you end up doing two round-trips across the river, almost touching the water. It's not really dangerous as you're perfectly secured, but the adrenaline rush is still a bit more intense than the one you get on the smaller version on the playground at home. :-)



Here's a little video of Sylvia and me crossing the river on the zipline:

[ UPDATE: if the video doesn't work, click here instead for a version without music. Looks like they're really strict with copyrighted material on YouTube now.. :-(  ]

The real adventure though was the whitewater rafting excursion on the afternoon.

They took us a few miles upstream, gave us a few safety intructions -

and off we went!

There were quite some currents in the river, fortunately our rafting guide/captain Marius was pretty experienced and gave clear instructions how to survive.

 

This was one of the several occasions where Marius had to shout the "Mayday!" command - a large wave was about to hit our boat, and you want to make sure to stay on board. 

Celebration! We made it back to the home base.













Note the slightly painful expression on my (Max) face? Well, about two thirds into the trip, I managed to sprain my foot during one of the "Mayday!" maneuvers ... fortunately it turned out only to be a minor injury, but we actually went to a hospital in Mendoza that same night and did an x-ray just to be safe. Well, no risk no fun. A lot worse things can happen during whitewater rafting, and despite the small setback it was definitely an amazing experience!

Our last day in Mendoza, we originally wanted to do another winery tour with lunch, but instead we did this:

And so we went back to Buenos Aires by bus the next day.

If you ever come to Argentina, make sure to go to Mendoza - this was definitely one of the coolest (well, hottest) weeks of our trip so far!