Mendoza, Wine country, Argentina

We arrived at Mendoza at midday after 28hrs on a bus...I think this particular week we had spent more time on a bus than any where else! We walked straight to the hostel where we were in a 6 room dorm with Tanya & Andy. We did a quick wash and change and were back out again within half an hour to go to the Bikes and Wine tour. After about an hour on a local bus we arrived in what looked like an un loved town and headed for the bike hire place walking past burnt out cars. We had a new recruit with us, Sophie, she was in our dorm and had arrived about ten mins before us.
We eventually found the bike hire place and picked up our very dodgy un loved bikes. we had to turn back twice as Tanyas bike had a puncture and Bretts chain had come off! we had a map and there were 12 different vine yards to tour so we decided to head to the furthest first as we thought the small distance back would be beast after we had 'tasted' lots of wine! It was a very hot day and a very long trip to the first vineyard. After we finally made it we skipped the wine tasting and just bought a couple of bottles to go with our lunch and this is how it continued as we went to each vineyard but more of the wine and less of the food. We finished up in a lovely vineyard which had a bar and looked over the fields so we had abottle of there reserve and a few others before realizing that our bikes were due back an hour ago and we had some distance to travel a little drunk!
We had two dogs follow us the whole way back to the bike hire place where we were greeted by a grumpy man wondering where his 5 bikes were! As the biked were in such a poor condition and we didn't receive half the things we had been promised we refused to pay out late return fee and went on our way to the bus stop to return to the hostel.
The hostel has free wine every night between 8pm and 9pm so we arrived back at 8pm just in time for more wine but free! YAY! the hostel staff had arranged a meal out that night to the famous steak restaurant so we drunk lots of wine and headed out for dinner about 10pm. The steaks here were huge I've never seen any thing like it in my life! Of course with me being fussy and not eating steak I had a vegetarian meal...I received some strange looks when I ordered it! We had a lovely evening and didn't leave the restaurant till gone 2am, where all the others went on to a club but Brett, Andy & I had a 6am bus to catch so headed back to the hostel.
We heard the others fall back in to our room about 5.30am. Sophie who had come to the wineries with us had gone on to the club and was in a pretty bad way after her all day/night bender! No one moved when we woke up to leave at 6am except Tanya to say a good bye we were heading to Chile then NZ so there was no chance of bumping in to her again, so it was our final farewell after meeting all the way back in Brazil.
Our flight to New Zealand was the following day at about 11pm so we had to make it on the 11 hour coach trip to Chile. we'd heard reports of bad weather and the border being closed, we had every thing crossed that it would be OK for us or we would be missing our flight to New Zealand. There were quite a few people who had been turned back on several occasion as the weather had got so bad. So off we went to the bus station, our bus was there and we were ready to go to Chile.....