The Champagne Cave

San Juan - residence of the sun, apparently. I couldn't agree more! The weather has been really pleasant since we left Salta - not a cloud in the sky and temperatures of around 20 degrees C. I divided my time in S.J. between shopping and visiting various places of interest inside and outside the city. Ordinarily I'm not a huge fan of clothes-shopping, but when I've been wearing the same damn trousers/shoes/hoodie for the last 4 months, I'm all for replacing them. Especially when everything here is so cheap! Brand stuff for a 5th of the price that you would pay in the Belgium/England. Yep, San Juan has been good to us, or to be more exact, we've been good to San Juan when it comes to shopping. Normally I'd feel guilty for buying that much stuff, but converting it to euros/pounds makes me feel a whole lot better. I might actually come back to Heathrow not looking like a bum! If I make it back that is... I found out yesterday how critical the situation in London is. Hopefully it will have calmed down by the end of August, otherwise I could be facing a delay. But that's not a major worry of mine at the moment. I know it may be a naive way of looking at it, but rather hundreds of delays than thousands dead. Watching BBC world this morning was slightly worrying. It seemed like the start of the apocalypse: typhoons in China, forest fires in Portugal, volcanoes exploding in Hawaii, the crisis in Lebanon, Heathrow grinding to a halt, etc. etc. The end is nigh! Or not. Yet.

Anywho, there was a huge range of museums to visit in San Juan, but we restricted ourselves to the museum of natural history. I had my fair share of ceramics and indigenous/religious art in Peru and Bolivia. Yesterday I went an a mini day-trip to Zonda, an area 20 km west of the city centre (coincidentally I also stayed in the Hostel Zonda). There was a small museum of natural history there (not to be confused with the one in the city centre), in a cave and curated by a strange old man. The collection was a bit run down, but interesting enough. I get the impression the museum doesn't get many visitors, so the old man was all too keen to give us an explanation/info about the place! Then we visited Gran Cava, the champagne cave, which was only 10 minutes down the road from the museum. What the hell is a champagne cave, you ask? Exactly what it says on the bottle: a champagne bodega (winery) in a cave! It was incredible. Cat and I had to ring the bell twice before someone came out and opened the massive gates to let us in. It was like some James Bond contraption. After walking along the cave entrance (atmospherically lit, mind you) for about 200 metres we reached the centre of the bodega, where the champagne was bottled. The guide then took us to the fermentation tanks at the end of the cave, and let us taste a bit of their Champagne Nature, tapped straight from the tank. Champagne ain't a favourite drink of mine, but that was damn tasty! We were then led to the "sales" room, where the bottles are packaged and sold to visitors of the bodega. The music in the background totally suited the mood: gregorian chant. How surreal. A bizarre experience to say the least. Apparently there are only three champagne caves in the world, this being one of them. The other two are located somewhere in France and Spain.

Today we took a bus to Mendoza, and are planning to spend at least 4 days here. Most of the main bodegas in Argentina are situated in and around Mendoza, so plenty of wine-tasting to look forward to!