Rafting on the Rio Corcovado

---

From El Bolsón it's another couple of hours to the modest town of Esquel, over the provincial border in Chubut. Esquel's attraction lies in its proximity to the Parque Nacional Los Alerces, home of rare, thousands-of-years-old alerce trees found in only a handful of places in the world. Well, that's the theory anyway. Our plans to visit the park on a two-day hike are scuppered by the inability of either the National Park office or Esquel's tourist information office to tell us if the trail is open. Argentine inefficiency at its frustrating worst. We nevertheless get to see the park on a day visit, albeit through a sky thick with the same bloody volcanic ash that we saw around Bariloche - vagaries of the wind!

The slight disappointment (we're still pretty tired from our hike in El Bolsón so perhaps it wasn't such a bad thing) quickly evaporates a day later, as we set out for a day of white-water rafting on the beautiful Río Corcovado, mere miles away from the Chilean border. Brilliant!

We take advantage of our final day in Esquel to catch a bus a few miles south to the town of Trevelin. If the name sounds Welsh, it's because it is! Chubut is home to Argentina's largest and strongest Welsh communities - place names like Trelew and Puerto Madryn dot the province. There isn't much to Trevelin, as it sure doesn't look Welsh (for one, the weather is actually nice there). What it does have, however, are a couple of teahouses which specialise in serving "traditional Welsh tea". It's all a bit naff - it reminds me of the numerous, chintzy little "Engrish" tea shops you find all over Japan which serve, with great fanfare, something which doesn't even vaguely resemble anything I've ever had at home. But, having said that, who are we to turn down the opportunity of eating delicious and highly calorific cream cakes on a blistering summer's day? Welsh or not, the torta a la crema - essentially two thin sheets of pastry with a thick layer of clotted cream in between - is worth the bus ride, and even the feeling of slight nausea which follows us back to Esquel.

The same evening we catch an overnight bus to Comodoro Rivadavia - a coastal oil town widely reported to be, well, an absolute hole. What, I wonder, shall we make of it?

---