Bariloche

The Road to Bariloche was a painfully long one. The bus started at 3 in the afternoon, would not stop at any decent hour for a meal and was generally uncomfortable. It did not help that the landscape was boring. Once you 've done enough 20 + hour bus rides you very quickly realise that the best rides are the ones that start in the morning and end after a night’s sleep. This one was a 28 hour ride that ended being some 31 hours so we had a full next day in the bus. At about 7 just as we began to get really itchy the landscape changed. The mountains were covered in huge green conifers, and lakes, big and small, dotted the valleys. We were passing through El Bolson. In a couple of hours we reached Bariloche. The first sight that you catch as you enter Baricloche is the huge Nahuel Huapi lago. It questions every belief I had of what constitutes a lake. NH is huge, has waves that actually break.

We stayed at the Las Moiras, one of our favourite hostels yet, not only for the hostel itself, but the staff too. Bariloche is a pretty little town on the edge of the lake districts. It is considered safe and seems to be home to lot Partenos who got tired of the big city life in Buenas Aires. We happened to reach on the day that it was celebrating its 100 something anniversary. The town was festive, and it was nice to be part of a huge crowd, the first since we left New York some 2 months ago. Yannick got himself some cotton candy as the fireworks lit up the sky.

That morning we trekked up to Cerro Campanaria, according to many one of the top 10 views in the world. The trek itself was about an hour and a half but up a stiff incline. We got glimpses of the view we would see, but nothing prepared us for what we saw when we reached the summit , a huge water body with beautiful islands covered in trees with leaves in green or bright yellow. On one island was a small log house with smoke coming out of its quaint chimney...enchanting. The lakes were set against the Andes, and that made the whole scene even more spectacular.

The next day we hired a car and drove through the 7 lakes. These lakes are huge and they make the lakes in Scotland look like little wading pools. Once again the fall colours with the lake as a foreground was stunning. It was cold, as low as -5 C but the sun was out. It felt really strange. Ice along the roadside, something I was particularly worried about since I had never driven in these conditions and I had enough on my plate driving a left hand drive for the first time and trying to keep the car on the right lane instead of the left. The real difficulty is when you get to a round-about, but luckily the route we took was pretty devoid of traffic so it was easy to acclimatise. The drive was beautiful, and we even stopped by the side of a beautiful little river, not much bigger that a stream really, to eat our sandwich lunch. I skimmed pebbles in the water with Yannick and it took me back to my school days. Tom, a young Londoner who  was taking a few months off to travel before heading to university at Cambridge joined us on the drive as we had room for one more in the car. The little towns we stopped in enroute were picturesque, especially Villa Angostura. We stayed the night in San Martin de los Andes and took off to El Bolson early next morning. We took another route back and once again we were blown by the natural beauty of this route. Seeing huge horse grazing along the gravel road added to the ethereal effect.

El Bolson was a 7 hour drive and I was kind of tired by the time we got there but we had a trek to we wanted to do, and only a few hours before it got dark, so we headed straight to the tourist info office to register ourselves. This is something you have to do before heading into the mountains because it is very easy to get lost in the dark.