After a few days spent in Mendoza doing not very much apart from cycling round the region's world famous wineries sampling the local tipple, we make another jump southwards - a 1,200km, sixteen-hour jump mind you - to a city whose name most Argentines cannot mention without getting all misty-eyed and gooey. San Carlos de Bariloche - or, more commonly, simply Bariloche. The last leg of the marathon bus journey, from the city of Neuquén to Bariloche, sees our bus crawl its way through a thick, murky fog of dust - this is the dreaded ash cloud which since June this year has been pouring from a fissure in the Puyehue volcano system over the border in Chile, smothering whole towns in several feet of volcanic sand and pumice stone, threatening to wreak havoc on the
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