We arrived in Mendoza in the morning after a 18 h bus ride from Salta. It was ok though – it didn’t feel that long and we got a good amount of sleep. We were lucky to be able to check in at our AirBnB straight away, shower, do laundry, get organized etc. Later, we ventured out to see the city – one of the greenest ones we’ve seen yet. Unfortunately, weather was grey and it started to rain soon, so after seeing the main squares and streets, we returned to our AirBnB.

Next day it looked a little better, so we took a train and bus to Maipu where many bodegas are located and where we were able to rent bikes. In the course of the afternoon, we visited 3 different wine goods and did a wine tasting at each of them. While the cycling wasn’t as nice as expected (big roads and lots of traffic), it was a fun way to spend an afternoon. We realized that we definitely preferred red over white wines of the region and the rosés were barely drinkable. The views from the wine goods were quite pretty, despite the clouds that stayed persistently throughout the day.

On our third day in Mendoza, we woke up super early and caught a bus at 6 am to Aconcagua National Park. It takes 3.5 h to get there, so if you want to hike to the base camp Confluencia like we did, you don’t have another option. The drive itself was spectacular already and we were once again (like so many times on this trip) sad to be on a bus where we couldn’t stop for photos. Luckily, the landscape was still beautiful when we arrived!

We straight away set off for the hike – it takes about 6 h and the last bus is at 16.30, so you can’t be much slower than that. It’s not that we’re such slow hikers, but we (especially *one of us*) loves to take hundreds of pictures which always takes a bit, stopping a lot along the way. As mentioned, the mountain scenery around us was breathtaking! We were so lucky it had snowed the day before, so in the morning everything was covered with a layer of fresh snow… On our way back, most of it had melted already.

Even if the main attraction of the hike – Mt. Aconcagua – was hiding himself behind a blanket of clouds, we really enjoyed the hike. The surrounding mountains made up for missing out on Aconcagua and the trail leads through such a nice valley, that you have beautiful views in both directions. Very much recommended!

From Mendoza, we hopped on a bus across the boarder again – to Valparaíso.