Getting fat in Bariloche

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I need a new lexicon. I have just spent 5 hours on a bus ride that isn’t even mentioned in any guidebooks and I cannot find the superlatives to describe it. I should have paid more attention to the thesaurus I was given many years ago, trouble is I never understood what it was for for about 10 years, by which time it was too late to use.

Anyway imagine if you can towering mountains, brush-filled dry deserts, wooded valleys, lakes, rivers, condors, and big blue skies over the course of this journey and add the necessary superlatives to make it really good…that was the journey back from National Park Lanin (Junin do Los Andes) to Bariloche. The route to the park is the famous Siete Lagos route which is famous because it passes seven lakes on the way down this dusty unmade road. It’s okay, but I think this was better, so for anyone thinking of doing the former, make sure you do both.

We are now back in Bariloche, and about to get on a bus to Buenos Aires for Christmas. This is a 24 hour journey, but we´ve got our favourite seats so it should be ok. Yes we have favourite seats now! For info they are at the back on the bottom deck of a two-deck coach. Several reasons for this, too complex to go into here but take my word for it. We even get fed a bit but go with a stock of snacks and the odd bottle of red to make the time pass.

Been here in the Lake District for three weeks now since leaving Venezuela. Add that to the time we spent here previous to diverting to Ven, we’ve been here longer than anywhere else except Bolivia (ahhh - the memories! Or should that be arrrggghhh the memories?!). This is because we love it here. Loads of stuff to do, great food and wine and fab scenery.

We came back to do our Spanish school. Yes I know we’ve already been in S. Am. for 8 months and should be fluent by now but languages were never my strong point (flash back to O-level mock French exam having to cheat to even get a pass - our French master was actually called Mr.Francis!). So we wanted to make a step change between mumbling stcok phrases to more conversational ability.

Now, both being professional people with high expectations, we didn’t just plunge into the first available school - oh no, that isn’t the Rogers and Pemberton way. We had a plan - several hours of research on the internet and a tour around the town to visit likely schools and interview the teachers for their suitability. This resulted in us signing up for two weeks at the Patagonia School of Spanish - who teach using holistic methods. No, I didn’t know what this meant either before it was explained that it utilizes many different media types and styles to ensure you don’t get too bored sitting there for hours on end. And it works too. Every day we turned up and got some intensive learning for six hours a day with virtually no breaks, and I can honestly say we never got bored. Our teachers Andrea and Fernanda were fab, really clued-up on ways to keep interesting and varied, and never afraid to change things if we started to flag or look bored. Totally recommend it. And we got another certificate to add to our collection of Spanish basic course certificates we have got at home, almost enough to re-paper the bathroom by now.

So now were a lot more clued-up on the old espanol, but we had virtually no time to enjoy being in Bariloche, except perhaps the restaurants. Despite having a great cabaña with kitchen to use, we only managed to cook two or three times. Its just not worth buying loads of ingredients when the restaurants are so good and cheap. We recommend especially El Patacon (best steak ever), Dias de Zapatos (great frozen margaritas), and La Andina (fab lunchtime empanadas). They all have good wine, lots of it, and cheap. Avoid Wilkeney, its wil-rubbish.

So by the time we finished at school we needed to rest up for a couple of days before thinking about what next. Already having the trip back to BsAs booked up, we only had a week or so to play with. Finally we decided to head up to National Park Lanin, with its fab namesake volcano - a perfect cone you can see from miles and miles away as its about a mile higher than anything else around it.

We ended up traveling to Junin de Los Andes, the poorer brother to the allegedly posher San Martin de Los Andes and just up the road, because the Lying Planet told us it had better transport links into the park. Ummm…

The park is enormous, big, and therefore you can't just wander in for the day. And we're not campers. So we thought we could nip in and out for a days trekking on the buses and have a good old look around. Ha! There is a high season around here, in summer, but we cannot figure out when it actually starts, despite it being mid-December, the equivalent of June to us in the UK, and sure seems to be summer. But no, and none of the buses run until summer starts. So we had to get a rather expensive taxi into the park, stay at an even more expensive hostel overnight, and then taxi out again the next day. Overall a bit harsh on the pocket.

Having had that moan, the park around Lago Paimun is beautiful and the volcano very impressive. There is also a great-looking campsite at the end of the road (near the waterfall) which is good and a much better option than the Hosteria Paimun - which is in a beautiful spot to. So we had a couple of days in there and managed to walk around a bit but not as much as we had hoped. We set out one day for the main event, the walk up to a viewpoint for the volcano, only to miss the turning, walk around mystified for a while, and then give up in frustration. Park Lanin; great place spoiled by duff information from the Lying Planet.

Junin itself is a sleeply little town whose main event is the trout fishing. The hostel we stayed in (chimerhue or something, in the LP) is good, the senora bakes fabulous cakes, and you get a huge plate worth every morning for breakfast included and more for afternoon tea if the fancy takes you (which it did!). But the whole place is focused towards fishing and the walls are festooned with pictures of the one that didn’t get away, stuffed prize fish, and various other memorabilia of fishermen, the lives and catches. Other than that not much to tell about Junin, except it has a good restaurant called El restaurante del Museo, which is attached to a small museum which seems to stay open as long as the restaurant has punter in it, which given the argentine penchance for eating at eleven or later, means the poor people have to stay up very late. Good food though, and wine. Did I mention the wine?

From there it was down back through Bariloche and further south to El Bolson. This is billed as a hippy town of great crafts and scenery where all the hippies live. Sure enough the craft fair ran and we looked, but have now built up a pretty good resistance to the urge to pick up salad servers shaped out of the local (rare) wood, or toy stoves which actually burn little smoke burners. How we do it I don’t know! We had rented an apartment from a friend of Andrea our teacher in Bariloche which was fine and had fabulous views in all directions from multiple windows which allowed the sun to come in strong from very, very early. We seemed to have hit a big weekend, as one night the kids were all out celebrating the end of school until dawn, and the next the whole town was out celebrating Boca Juniors win in the S.Am cup (football of course). So sleep was a bit precious.

But safely now back in Bariloche, stocking up on views and chocolate before breaking away for Christmas. We will be very sorry to leave the mountains, they are truly beautiful and we could easily live here - or at least buy a nice holiday home on the lake. Oh, and we just put ourselves on the scales again…oh dear…

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Comments

[julieboolie x]

fab fotos,love the corona and thelake napelhue, i'll be wanting copies