Advertisement
Published: April 15th 2007
Bariloche So I
finally managed to get myself away from Mendoza, after around 5 days there of partying and relaxing! I found out just before leaving that Silke had bought a ticket and would be in Buenos Aires on the 25th (woohoooooooooo!!!!!!) so I had around 10 days to see what I wanted to in Patagonia.
First stop was San Carlos de Barilcohe, a ski-resorty kind of town on the edge of a deep blue lake. The weather unfortunately wasn't too kind to me on the first day, but on the second day I was able to take an excursion out to Nahuel Huapi National Park. There were a few mini-hikes en route, including one to the top of an impressive waterfall that provided good views out over the park. The highlight though was
El Tronador (the Thunderer) .. the highest peak in the park, and location of the black glacier. So called because by the time the ice reaches the bottom the water to rock ratio means that the ice appears almost totally black.
7 Lakes Route I had heard many things about the famous Ruta de Siete Lagos (7 lakes route) that runs for
a 25km section between Villa Angostura and San Martin de los Andes. The only available day to do it was unfortunately the worst day of weather I've experienced since the day I got soaked out on Lake Titicaca. I hired a car, along with an English guy, a German girl and a Norwegian woman. What fun driving through the rain!!!! About half an hour past Villa Angostura we saw a sign towards San Martin and took it, but turned back after a mile on that road, because the surface was so appalling we thought it couldn't possibly be the right one. So we headed back out onto the main road, which as it turned out actually took us practically to the Chilean border. No thanks. And to make things even more amusing we (well, Owen .. the English) had a minor slide off the road on a very slippery corner going up the mountain. Luckily though the gravel killed what speed we had, and we only knocked into the barrier .. minor paintwork damage only. Looking at the almost horizontal state of the barrier, it looks like we weren't the first (and won't be the last) to go off at
that point.
So it turned out that the road of the appalling surface was indeed the road we needed! 25kms of rainy, dirt track ... dodging numerous potholes, avoiding sand traps and worrying about the potential (lack of) fuel situation!! And we didn't even get the best of it, because the rain made the visibility so low that we couldn't properly see the lakes we were passing, which was a real shame as from what I could see they looked absolutely stunning. We eventually made it to San Martin after about 7 hours driving ... we spent about an hour there having coffee and chocolate and then headed back to Bariloche!! Agghh, what a chuckle! I had to laugh :-)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.097s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 8; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0539s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
