From white water to red wine

Mendoza is a place most people visit for two reasons, adventure sports and wine. With some White water rafting and a cycle tour through the vineyards we put a tick in both of those boxes.

On Valentines day we jumped into a van early in the morning (well 9.30..) which would take us about an hour or so up into the Andes where there are grade 3 - 6 white water rapids. We can safely mention this now since we got out unharmed and it is unlikely our insurance agents will ever read this. At the basecamp we were kitted out with our wetsuits, life jackets, water resistant sweaters, helmets and anythign else you needed to look absolutely ridiculous but feel a bit more comfortable on/in the river which fed from melted glaciers in the mountains very high up in the Andes. The water up there is cold, very cold we noticed soon after our safety briefing. A briefing that surmounted to three pieces of simple advice

• dont fall out
• if you do, try to get back in the raft quickly
• if the safety kayaks try to save you, try not to flip them over, they will get wet and upset.

Which all sounds very sensible.

So after some exercises to make sure we'll not do something stupid we set out on the river,which seemed a bit calm for white water rafting. And in adition, the water looked very much more chocolatey than white. The water was a bit low and slow, but even so we did hit a few rapids that were quite interesting where we got completely soaked and nearly fell out. We kept in the raft all the way though, and we had loads of fun.





Since this was Valentines day we went out for dinner, traditional Argentinian parrillada, with some nice local wine. Dinner was followed by a nice 'death by chocolate' dessert accompanied by a chocolate Marguarita. All in all a nice way to spend Valentines day.







Next morning, almost as early, we were again picked up by a van - this time to be deposited in wine country, where we picked up our bikes and headed out among the vines. The Maipu Wineries maily focus on red wine and the most popular is Malbec, which is one of our favourite varieties so we had high hopes for this day. Though not as scenic as the Barossa valley or Marlborough, the wines certainly made up for it and some of the vineyards had stunnig views of the Andes and endless fields of grapes and olives. If you get a change to lay your hands on some Tempus Alba or Vina Maria, take it, they had some varieties that were fantastic. And true to our habits, we are now carrying some of Mendozas fines grape produce in our bags.

Houston we have a problem

That famous movie quote is yet another reason why we've all heard of Houston, and another reason for us to check out the local space centre for an out of this world experience. But first, we were roped into a far more important job - setting up and executing a photo shoot for the most important person in the house. Of course we're talking about young Matthew, who was kind enough to pose for us for this shot.


Johnson Space Centre...
...as it is currently called is where all the action went down 20-30 years ago and when man was still excited about going into space. Admittedly the excitement has died down somewhat since then but we wanted to rekindle a bit of that wonder about space that we had while children and relive a bit what the fuss had been all about.

It was all there, the spacesuits, the real, honest to goodness control centre from the first moon landing, the rockets...



Texas Dinner
In the evening we went for an all American Texas steakhouse for some dinner, and this came highly recommended by a colleague of Neil's. We arrived to a place with an outside seating area of picnic style long tables with a certain air about them, and quite a few people were there as well. Inside was ever more 'rustic' as Suzanna put it, it looked like a saloon but with a kitchen-bar instead of a liquid one. The beer instead was in a wooden through packed with ice. Rustic indeed.

Though the food was nice, and very Texan. You had a choice of about 15 different types of meat which would be accompanied by 2 types of vegetables, out of a selection of 5. When we got to the vegetables section there was potato salad, re fried beans, rice, coleslaw and something unidentified, and when we asked if any of the vegetables included, well, vegetables the answer was a very quick and proud,

"no ma'am!... well maybe the coleslaw, i think that has carrots in it".

Classic.

More top tips for Tallinn

Tallinn

Top tip number one. When looking at a menu thinking, mmmm that steak looks nice, rethink. The Estonians do a lot of things well, (kitch-shops, amber, old-towns, views, city walls etc) but beef is not one of them. When given a choice, choose fish.

Number two is more of a warning if you are driving. How many times have you pleaded with the bus driver to let you off when stopped at a red light just outside of where you are going, instead of having to go 2 miles down the road to the bus stop only to be refused due to health-and-safety. Not so in Tallinn, when driving on a main through road (compare it with an a-road in England or a blue 'riksväg' in Sweden), and a tram stops in the outside lane just ahead of you - break, for the love of god, break. That might just be a tram stop and people might start pouring out, as we discovered yesterday. I was ... surprised ... to say the least, but I think we managed to keep the bumper clean.

Top-tip number three is twofold, if you are aiming here to shop for more reasonably priced alcohol, look for beer and spirits, wine is not that cheap. But make sure you have done your price check before. We found a few discrepancies in the pricing here. We've been looking for two types of wine, valpolicella and chardonnay since we are going to need about 40-50 bottles of that soon. So we made tracks to the big outlets, because obviously thats where the cheap wine would be, and we found one pretty soon that had exactly what we wanted and in bulk, so all looked good, right?? Wrong!!!
Fortunately while all the other Swedes ran wild amongst the shelves we've had gotten a few reference prices to check up on;


Masi Campofiore: Sweden 83 SEK -Tallinn 95 SEK
Tommasi Valpolicella: Sweden: 99 SEK Ferry, 91 SEK (262 SEK in the restaurant!) Tallinn : 89 SEK

Lindeman Bin 65: Sweden 73 SEK Tallinn : 100 SEK

And those are just a few examples, fortunately we brought the price list from systembolaget with us. I originally aimed to bring that as a reference to check the descriptions and recommendations, since I am not that good at reading Estonian. It turned out to be quite useful to avoid being ripped off as well.

So come prepared!

Top tip #4. Spend some time in the old town in your walking shoes and do it on a weekday. If you have a look at the pictures, you'll see that there were not that many people around. IT was quite nice to wander around, read the plaques, take lots of pictures and to stop at lovely smelling coffee shops and watch the local kids go wild. I expect it to be quite different during weekends in peak tourist season.


So we might have failed in our quest to get a huge batch of wine, but this is my first visit to Tallinn, and I really enjoyed the walkabout in the old town. It reminds me of Gamla Stan in Stockholm, but with less aggressive shop/restaurant owners trying to sell you stuff. We also managed to book ourselves into a spa hotel and made use of the hotel pool in the evening, as if the 4 hour walk wasn't enough exercise, but it felt really good afterwards.
And on top of that, just next door is a huge marina, with some gorgeous evening views accompanying a decent dinner, but again, be warned - eat fish, not meat .