I whine, you whine, we all whine for wine

See our photos from Salta and around.

"If I eat another steak, I'll cry...."

It'll get like that eventually. I'll probably get fed up of the huge, juicy slabs of meat, cooked to perfection. The thing about Argentina is that you are expected to consume half a cow at every meal. And a bottle of wine. There's not much else to the menu. Unsurprisingly, the rate of heart disease here is high. We've already started to ration our steak intake, not just because of health reasons but because it's getting boring. Fillet, sirloin, rump or chicken if you're lucky.

We've only been in the country for a week but have started getting pregnant-woman-like-cravings for something else, different food - anything! Yesterday, Jody and I did the unthinkable. We went on a spending spree in the local fruit and veg market, coming back to the hostel with an array of raw produce and eating it all along with a tin of tuna and glasses of milk. The women working at the hostal looked on amused while tucking into their beef dinner. Tonight though, we're returning to meat for our first Parrilla (pah-ree-ya) - an Argentine speciality. It's a barbecued assortment of beef cuts including offal and tripe (yuk!) along with steak and sausages. Almost a whole cow!

It's all about excess from what we've seen so far. Huge dinners, lots of wine and late nights. We're just back from a two-day tour of the local valleys. Despite a heavy schedule of beautiful views and pretty small towns, we all ended up staying out till dawn drinking wine and cheap beer on the first night, before getting up on the second day for wine-tasting at the local vineyards of Cafayate. No-one was sick. After lunch, we discovered the other Cafayate speciality - wine ice-cream. Beats Mr Whippy hands down but don't give it to the kids. There was a lot of real wine in there. The rest of the afternoon didn't go quite as smoothly as we raced round hairpin bends and bumpy roads on a belly full of Cabernet ice-cream.