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Published: December 24th 2006
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Arrived in Salta after a very long journey overnight and the first thing I noticed was nice roads and European cars! Yeah not too much to get excited about but the feel of the place was so different to where I had been before, this was definetely more like Europe and I wasn´t sure if I was going to like it or not.
Salta is a big city, nice and clean and good restaurants with great bife de chorizo (steak) and lots of shops but I wasn´t here for them so I quickly left after 2 nights for Mendoza, the heart of the wine region in Argentina. We went for a bikesandwines tour, your given a bicycle and a map of the vineyards and you cycle round to them tasting their wine, great idea!
Mendoza is a lovely place, very relaxed with nice plazas and a great park but again it was a city and all I really wanted to do was get into the south of Chile and into the Lakes District, into the open air but first I had to go via Santiago.
Santiago is a huge city, very busy, very noisy and lots of people and cars everywhere.
I didnt want to stay there long, so it was just a quick stop to buy some camping supplies and then onwards to a place called Pucon. I stayed in Santiago for 2 nights before getting a bus south, on the bus I fell asleep for maybe an hour before waking up with a chronic pain in my lower back, I could hardly walk off the bus! I spent the next 5 days in Pucon in bed pretty much!I was stuck in this beautiful place with it´s own volcano and 2 lakes not being able to do anything other than walk to the supermarket. I was getting frustrated and decided to take a bus to Bariloche, Argentina as time is running out and I have to keep moving south if Im to make it to Torres del Pain in southern Patagonia.
3 more days in Bariloche without being able to walk, it was getting worse so I went to the hospital who took x-rays and said there were no problems with my spine and therefore its muscular, so they gave me some anti-inflammatory pills which have made a big improvement to my back. Finally I was able to start walking
again and not just round town either!
On my first proper walk into the outdoors I met a group of Argentians on vaccation from near Buenos Aires, they then offered to take me to see some local sights in their car. It was a nice although only one of them could speak English very badly so I had to resort to my basic Spanish, but i managed to have a good conversation about the differences of living in Argentina and the UK. That evening I popped into an internet cafe and met the French couple that I had been travelling with in northern Peru, it was his 30th birthday so drinks were needed! We went out and had a great evening, they had hired a car for the next day to go on a famous circuit called Seite Lagos (Seven Lakes) and asked if I would like to join them, I said yes and the next day we left for 2 days of sightseeing, breathtaking scenery, very tranquil, just what the doctor ordered! When I returned it was time to head south again and to a place called El Bolson for hopefully some trekking!
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