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Published: March 3rd 2008
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A holiday within the trip? After Junin we headed further north to Zapala across a more open but empty landscape of vast plateaus between huge crater shaped depressions. It is dinosaur fossil country. From there we turned back west and headed back to the hills to eventually reach Villa Pehuenia.
In case you don't know, and why would you, Pehuen is the Mapuche indian word for Araucaria or Monkey Puzzle tree, these grow around here in forests. A bit weird as the older (bigger) ones have bark like an old grey alligator, and they don't really move in the wind. The female trees produce, at this time of year, big pine nuts which are used a lot in the local restaurants. And the nuts taste good too.
Villa Pehuenia is a very new village mainly on a peninsula on Lago Alumine, with dirt roads, no street names and no house numbers. But it does have plenty of places to stay and decent places to eat.
Monica, the owner of the hotel we stayed in, turned out to be the source of information about what to do, where to eat etc. On her advice we took a nice scenic
Pehuen trees
near the five lakes walk around the five small lakes nearby, followed by a doze at the lakeside.
Next day proved to be more strenuous as we went on a five hour horse ride from the village to the summit of Volcan Batea Mahuida overlooking the lake. Fabulous views all the way. Daniel our guide is a local Mapuche and he told us about when there were only 40 mapuche families living in this area and no tourists or even the village.
Almost as soon as we got back to the hotel Monica asked what we wanted to do next. We said "sailing". So lo and behold she was on the phone to somebody and, next day we were out for an afternoon on the lake sailing around with Marcello, who moved here to get away from city life in Rosario. He even brought the boat with him on a truck across the mountains. The sailing was great as there was some decent breeze and Marcello wanted to zoom along a bit so we had the boat half out of the water at times, I even got to be at the tiller when he had to do things with the sails. Really
good afternoon and we really felt that this had been a mini break away from the trip.
As we finished sailing it actually began to rain and by the time we got back to the hotel it really was lashing down and it continued on and off all night. Worried a bit about how we would leave town after this as there is gravel and ripio road in every direction for 30 or more kilometres. But of course we took Monica's advice and in the morning headed north east into the mist and only 35 km of ripio and one large goat herd (flock?) later we were on tarmac heading back to Zapala and onto Neuquen.
Turned up to drop off the car at the Hertz office in town as arranged to find it all locked up. Ended up retracing our steps out to the airport and dropping the car there with a man who then gave us a lift back into town where we spent the evening before going off to the bus station for our overnight bus to San Rafael. Having had our taxi stress in Puerto Madryn some time ago we went nice and early
Batea Mahuida volcano
Can´t quite believe we rode to the top - fuzzy photo thanks to Tony my horse who doesn't like standing still! to the taxi rank and waited, and waited, and waited until about 10 minutes before the bus was due to leave a cab arrived. Fortunately the driver was very young, had no fear and clearly thought he was a reincarnation of Juan Fangio. He got us to the bus station in eight minutes breaking who knows how many laws. And of course the bus was late so there so rush.....one of these days our luck will run out but not this time.
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