Waiting for No Ash Wednesday

Villa la Angostura :: Argentina

Right now, I really should be in Chile.

Places: Bariloche, San Martin de Los Andes & Villa la Angostura.

Coolest thing I did: Shared a hire car around the Seven Lakes route, this time with the added bonus that we could stop the car to take pictures of things. The bus drivers here won't let you do that.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Not only can you ski here, but these lakes also hide a population crazed by chocolate.

So having knocked yourself out for 48 hours on spectacular alpine scenery the best thing it seems you can do is try and top it with more spectacular alpine scenery. This being a country full of wilderness and nothing there are certain parts that it's certainly easier to see with your own car, and I'm finding it's also rather easy to find groups of people hiring cars for this very reason who are happy to share them with you if you kick in for the costs. So with no inkling I'd actually be doing it that morning, I spent my second full day in Bariloche in a car being driven the scenic route to San Martin de Los Andes.

The best section is totally unpaved dirt road that winds it's way around several lakes with ample stops to view the sights. This had the added benefit of our driver for the early afternoon being Michela of Berlin, a young lady who seems to have absorbed scarily good driving skills by virtue of working for Mercedes Benz back home. There was a fair amount of sideways action around some of the corners, probably to the point I should have been holding notes and yelling out "hard right!" & "break". I'd like to think I'd have made an excellent rally navigator, except for my slow reaction time and terrible eyesight.

We'd decided to go for a swim in the lake at San Martin, because that was the end of the road, but with us being followed by the ever present ash cloud from Puyehue we thought it best to get into one of the earlier ones. The big benefit of this is there was only four of us to share it with the geese (downside being you have to wade through gooseshit to get to the water). I was the first to wade out to my knees and due to the settling of ash in the lake I felt it better to simply dive all the way in and keep swimming or treading water. Man, that water was cold. There being ladies involved I was too stubborn to admit I was freezing to death so I kept going for about 5 or so mins before wading back out, trying to look manly as I noticeably shivered. I think I was breathing so hard because my lungs had shrunk to the size of peas.

San Martin feels a lot like somewhere like Vail or Aspen translated into Spanish. There may have been a real, working town under there once, but it's not been converted into a fairly tale village in the mountains, again with the requisite beautiful lake to back onto. I'll remember that place for two things: ice cream and people learning karate in the board walk. The Argies seem to have far superior ice cream technology to the rest of us, with flavours that defy logic. Why would you have White Wine & Egg White ice cream? Who knows but it doesn't taste half bad. I also tend to think that because these guys haven't yet found a way to make lamb or steak flavoured ice cream means that it simply defies the laws of physics. I can't believe people who love meat and ice cream this much haven't tried to splice the two yet. Maybe there's people working on this in labs in Buenos Aires as we speak.

Today's update comes hard on the heels of the last, mostly because today has been a wee bit of a disaster. Due to our nonchalant habit of buying tickets at the last minute we've been bitten badly by all the buses going back into Chile today being full. That wouldn't be an issue, except there's a $480 ferry ride we should be checking in for starting 9am tomorrow over in Puerto Montt and that's about a 6 hour bus ride away, and our bus is now leaving here at 8.35am that day. The ferry sails at 2pm if everything goes 100% right so we should arrive in town with 15 mins to make that. Fingers crossed.

It's not come without trying hard to make amends for this. We took a bus to the closest town to the border, Villa la Angostura in the hope we could either get onto a bus which someone hadn't made it for in Bariloche or failing that hitch hike into Chile. With hindsight doing this on a public holiday was making it very hard for ourselves, as there seemed to be zero trucks or people in town with Chilean plates but none the less we did stand on the side of the road for about 4 hours until the border closed. The sign evolution tells a story. We started with "Chile". Simple enough, but then we added "Osorno", which is the first town in Chile. After that wasn't catching us any, we added "Por favor", to be polite. Towards the end of the day we thought "Tengo dinero" (I have money) was a nice touch, to make sure no-one thought we were some kind of free-loading backpackers, but all to no avail. So now we're on plan B, which is to go as early as we can and hope the ferry is delayed in leaving. Next time I'm writing this will either be me having spent 4 days on the fjords or me having been chastised with a $480 lesson on buying your bus tickets early in peak season.

Right now, I'm trying to be philosophical about it, but it's not been helped by Puyehue, which picked today to ramp up it's ash spewing a notch or three. It feels like I smoked 3 or 4 packs of cigarettes by standing by the side of the road and breathing the air. I also think we're getting noticed by people, sitting out having a beer to celebrate a day well fucked up people were all greeting us. My Spanish is not good enough to know if this is a very friendly town or whether we've become local celebrities, known for politely wanting to go to Chile and having money.

You're climbing what?

Bariloche :: Argentina

Apparently you can go about your business without being worried there's a volcano spewing ash on the horizon.

Places: Valdivia & Bariloche.

Coolest thing I did: I would have said the Patagonian lamb if you'd asked me two dinners ago, but the Bife de Chorizo cut of steak cooked by the Argies is how God has his steak done.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Germans were very big in South America after World War II. Apparently a lot of the Nazi hunters did very well around the Argentinian Lakes District. On the plus side, they taught the locals how to brew good beer.

Valdivia became a totally different place when the rain stopped. I woke up to bright blue skies on the second day and spent hours walking the foreshore of the three rivers that join up in and around the town. It might have been made even more pleasant if I hadn't been nursing the hangover from hell.

Why was I so hung over? One word: Kuntsmann. The brewery for this fine range of beers lies over a couple of bridges, a short taxi ride away from the middle of town and being rather enlightened they stay open until midnight, so if you show up in town in the afternoon after a long bus ride you can still go at dinner time. We started with a shot of all 10 beers they had on tap (including a rather nice blueberry one they only do at the brewery) and then decided to do pretty much the whole lot again in 1/2 litres. The staff were very kindly to people doing this, even though most of our translation had to be done by the one barman that spoke good English. Strangely enough we assumed he was Irish, being the first red haired Latino I've ever seen.

The brewery struck me as the kind of place people bring their kids to run riot on a Saturday while Mum and Dad smash a few litres of beer in peace and quiet. My favourite souvenir was a 5 litre jug with a sealed lid (kind of like the old Grolsh bottles for those who lived in Europe) that they fill up directly from the tap for you to take home. Saw quite a few of those go home with people. They even managed to make sure we got a taxi back into town when they closed up at midnight. However, instead of going home, which would have been sensible we decided to go hit the nightclubs.

It seems like we've been in Chile for telethon season, but they take their Teleton very seriously. People advertise it by writing the dates on the back of their car windows and while we were sitting there in the Irish pub at about 1am the crowd was going nuts and cheering every time they announced how much money had been made. Like the rest of the country it appears that telethons start late and finish late. I'm not sure how much they made, because we decided to keep moving clubs. I lost track of my mate James at one point and went home, only to find out he'd been in the DJ booth communicating with the DJ completely using Google translate. The DJ was apparently very bored, which I guess is what happens when you play the same club every week in a small town.

The next movement was to Bariloche, including the first of many border crossings for the trip. The road passes right in the path of Puyehue, which those in the Southern Hemisphere will remember as the scourge of air travel from Sydney to Capetown about 18 months ago. Well it's spewing loads of ash again, and when we we through it was all piled up next to the road like snow. The story we're being told is this time it only disrupted air traffic as far away as Uruguay but it did spend most of yesterday afternoon blocking out the sun here, so there might be more to tell of that story yet.

The bus ride from Valdivia to Bariloche is simply amazing, following the side of Nahuel Huapi lake, which is serious ski country in winter and a flawless alpine lake in summer, surrounded by the head wrecking jagged peaks that seem to dominate this part of the world.

So when in Bariloche you're pretty much here to ski in winter or climb things in summer. We took a day hike up around the main ski hill, Cerro Cathedral which shields a turquoise lake in a valley about 3 and a bit hike hours up. Nestled in that valley is Refugio Frey, a small bunch of huts that people sleep in when they're doing more serious hiking up in the mountains for days, and if you're like most of us you'll have lunch at and go home. It's hard to describe the setting without resorting to cliches, you'll just have to wait for the pictures. There's a certain serenity to sitting there with your feet in the crystal clear water pondering stone towers shaped like ice crystals made out of rock. While I was doing this a group of 3 blokes from Colorado found their way into the valley, and it turns out their entire reason for being up there was to spend a whole week climbing these sheer stone walls. Part of me kind of longed to have that kind of focus when I go on these trips. I kind of get edgy when I've been in the same place for 2 or 3 days.