Horsing around!

As we boarded the bus that would be our home for the next 14 hours, something felt different. We had had to book the executive class bus as the others were full, but `executive` usually means that you get Spanish films and your own chair. This however was amazing, huge leather chairs with more leg room than you need and the chair reclined in to a horizontal position so that it was actually a bed. Things got better as the film was in English, a 3 course meal was served and then pre sleep drinks of Whiskey and Tia Maria were given. Why the hell aren´t all buses like this? It could have been an advert for Carlsberg.... "if Carlsberg made buses!".

Anyway, we arrived in Mendoza, which is in the heart of the wine region, feeling very refreshed from our luxury bus. As I said Mendoza is the main wine region in Argentina so as you can imagine just a little more wine was enjoyed during our stay here. However there was the added bonus of our hostel being on one of the many grassy plazas the town has. Our Plaza was "Plaza De Chile", the bonus being that as it was Chilean Independence day and there was a 4 day party going on with whole cows being roasted on bonfires and as much drink as you could shake a stick at (so this meant more wine, beer and steak!!! it´s a hard life!).

However we hadn´t come to Mendoza for the wine.... honest! We had come because the town is on the fringe of the spectacular Andean range and we wanted to get into the mountains. We had planned to go hiking but my knee has been hurting recently (probably gout, considering my current diet!) so we had to re-think. How could we get into the mountains without walking, but without sitting on a tour bus. HORSES!!!! One problem Ellie is very scared of them. Still it sounded really cool and if she could get on a motor bike in Vietnam horses should be easy. "Not that many people die in horse accidents El" I said as she climbed onto her horse "No, most of them are paralysed!" This helped her fear massively.

The riding was fantastic and Ellie, much to her relief, had the slowest most docile horse in the world and plodded along happily without risk of death. The scenery was breathtaking, although we were slightly beaten by the clouds again as the highest peaks could not be seen. My horse was called Mr Gaucho, which actually translates into English as "Devil horse!". He hated all the other horses so tried to bite them, spit on them and actually crapped on 2 of them. I liked him a lot and with a kick he liked to gallop, which my bum now doesn´t like much!

After a morning spent with our very different horses it was time to try a very different activity. We had considered spending a few hours abseiling but as the drops were only 18m we decided on canopying. I think that canopying is the official word but I would call it "zip lining". Standing on top of a mountain, connected to a piece of wire that spanned several hundreds meters of jagged rock and river 50m below me, I suddenly really wished that the safety talk had been in English. I Knew that if the instructor at the end of the wire started shouting and waving his arms around frantically I had to slow down. Unfortunately I had missed how to slow down and so had Ellie (our Spanish is still bad!). This however added to the risk of the activity and we just jumped off and decided it would be fine.

We spent several hours hurtling down different wires that screamed as you reached top speed. We managed to work out how to stop, in fact Ellie´s breaking was a little to strong on the last zip and she ended up stranded, 50m above the river with the Andean wind blowing her from side to side. After a quick rescue mission she was pulled to the end, much to my amusement. Luckily I had been ready with the camera when this happened!

We´re just about get on a 36 hour bus, Oh what fun! It´s not the executive bus either so we may be sharing our seats with several Argentinian families!