Heapsa´ Water and Face-Melting Steak & Red Wine - Argentina

The second half of month one has been much more travel packed, fuelled by a desire to get to warmer and cheaper climes (having found ourselves a tad over budget from pricey Brazil and Argentina). But nevertheless, we've managed to tick off one of our first of the seven wonders, tangoed in an old cathedral in BA, pedalled around wine country, and whipped up 2300km via 4 back to back buses en route to Bolivia.

Iguassu Falls

With roughly 300 waterfalls in one place, Iguassu falls did not disappoint, and there are few words to describe the sheer scale and other worldliness of these cascadas. In fact, we can't find any, so we'll let a couple of snaps paint the picture.  

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires has an infinite array of stuff to see, learn, move to, and of course, eat. For us, B.A. was always going to be a highlight because it tackles two of our biggest respective passions, dancing, and eating - more specifically, tango and steak. 

To cover off the first, we'd been reliably tipped off by our now good friend from Golders Green, Sophia, that the way to try Tango is at a Milonga night - essentially an early evening lesson (10pm, uber early by Argentinean standards), followed by joining all the locals, who we might add are pros, to see if we can snake our way around the floor to test out our newly acquired skills without hospitalising anyone. 

But firstly a word on what the Tango is, courtesy of our day one 'BA bike tour' guide, Facu (above). Argentina was first inhabited by a varied mix of Italians, Spanish and many other European immigrants, all of which couldn't communicate with one another initially. The only way they knew how to get to know one another became through dance, and so the Tango is a mix of all sorts of European dances, but also incredibly sexual, as it also had significant influence from local prostitutes involving themselves in its inception. 

In terms of style, it is almost all legs, and unfortunately for one of us in particular, not in the hips. 
Alice of course strutted to a good level with her eyes shut, I however struggled a tad to find my feet, and looked more newborn foal than Antoine Dubeck. 

Performance aside, it was a barrel'o laughs, and inspiring to see how big a part of the Argentine culture dancing still is. People in their 70s/80s were up and slinking their way round the dancefloor until 4am, and on a Wednesday night. We truly admire the Argentines' stamina when it comes to nights out, but are equally baffled at their order of doing things - a local's standard Friday night consists of heading straight home from work (que?!), napping until around 10pm, eating and then going out out at 1am. Bonkers. 

And so to the second known speciality of the region, Steak. We hit up three of the city's best known spots, two of which proved to satisfy the extremely high expectations of us both. The best of those was Las Cabras, of which we had the pleasure of sampling with the lovely Sophia, who's been living in B.A. for almost a year. 

The place was booming, purely with locals (always the tell-tale), and we queued quite contently for an hour for a table. We were quivering with excitement, and hungry as hell. 

We got in and were quick to order, and included a couple of local specialties as advised by Sophia - black pudding (with a dollop of scepticism from Alice), and a tamale (sweetcorn and cheese baked in the sweetcorn outer leaves). Both proved to be amazing, and the perfect tee-up to a mesmerising ribeye and fillet we all shared for mains. 

The combination of the charred outer and pink inner of the steak muddled with spicy, lemony chimichurri (look it up and make it, dead easy and pairs flawlessly with charred meat of any form), was impeccable. 'Gaucho' in London gives a reasonable effort at sharing this country's sumptuous, and frankly sky's ahead steak, but if you really want to taste the undisputed king/queen of beef, you have to visit Argentina. 

Mendoza 

We did our first homestay here and it couldn't have accredited more all the homestay recos we've been given by friends and fellow travellers so far. 
If you want to understand, experience and learn local culture, stay with the locals... 

The family we stayed with were two lovely couples, the two men from Mendoza, and the two girlfriends from Germany, and France. Not to mention the always entertaining baby Milo. The two Europeans spoke good English and so acted as amazing mediators for pushing our Spanish, which we believe (though Spaniards we've come across since would I'm sure disagree) has come on, umm, two fold. 

Introductions aside, Mendoza, as I'm sure you know, is Malbec country, and the done way to tour the vineyards is by bike. YUP. With map in hand and a morning thirst for full bodied bliss, we hit the road. We'd decided once you've done one tour, they're probably much the same, and so can cut to the chase (tastings) for the bodegas (vineyards) beyond. 

 

It's fair to say we quickly realised on our first tasting that our wine analysis is at a pretty surface level, with Alice's first comment of the day being 'it'd be good pre-drinking wine'. In fairness, it did taste like peach juice.

We re-calibrated our route, eliminating any more sweeter known bodegas and headed back out to 3 more spots that we'd been advised were more abud' with our tastes. We sessioned a number of deep & silky esophagus massagers and the top spot was awarded to bodega Meza, with not only a mind melting Malbec, but an outstanding white that balanced dry to fruity, flawlessly. 

Our remaining days in Mendoza were spent relaxing in the family's amazing home, reading and playing cards in the sun, and sipping the fruits of our research. The region is one of the most beautiful We've been to, with endless fields of long lines of vines, and a backdrop of the snow capped Andes. Simply stunning. 

That wraps up Argentina. We´ve actually since been in Bolivia for almost 3 weeks but internet is non-existent so it´s proving next to impossible to upload. But alas, a Bolivia post will follow in the coming weeks. Hope you´re all well and of course wish you could be here to experience this all with us. 

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