Bariloche- part 2

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Hi there everybody!

It's been a long time since our update, so I thought I'd getting cracking on a few things- just to close off on Bariloche.

I hired an instructor for 2 days, who was stoked that I didn't want a lesson, and only wanted to ski the best parts of the mountain. He was a yanked named JT, and a pretty good skier. We got straight into the trees, which was awesome. I think the locals must be scared of skiing there because even when the mountain was tracked, there's still heaps of fresh stuff in the pines.

Luckily the day I hired him, we'd had a massive dump and there was fresh powder all over the mountain and we just went hell for leather for a couple of hours. In hindsight, I really should have got him to take some photos, but it was just too magic to waste time with thate.

The second day I had him, it was pretty nasty weather and not as good snow. We remixed about Australia day parties OS and he told me he'd gone to one dressed as Ned Kelly hahahaha. Anyway, spent the morning trying to figure out how to do telemark skiing turns whilst going backwards and I can tell you it's really really really hard, but it gives me something to practice.

For people who aren't quite sure what I mean, you can see a video here- Tele Backwards

(unfortunately it's not me but the stack at the end was me all day long)

Anywho....

The mountain is quite big but there aren't too many big runs. Two days before we arrived, a 16 year old snowboarder went off piste and was climbing a cornice when it cracked and he was pushed downhill onto the mountain. Luckily he was wearing a beacon, but how in gods name the patrol managed to get to the slide, locate his beacon and unbury him in less than 10 minutes is beyond me. The saving grace was they have experienced international patrollers. Lesson here kids, never ski on your own. So that story put a bit of a dampner on my off piste plans.

Wednesday night we headed into town to go out. Went to a bar called Wilkenny, which is the place to be apparently, but like any place to be, it's full of tourists and ex-pats, so we got out pretty quickly. We went down to check out the super clubs, there are three in a row on the water in the middle of nowhere. We walked in the door and saw the entry price was $85 pesos ($30) each, so we laughed at them and left! We headed back up the mountain and heard music pumping from a pub up on the hill. After about 15 minutes of slipping/sliding/falling on ice, we managed to make it up there. We walked in and the crowd was very very young and all wearing halloween outfits! Apparently it was a year 12 graduation party and as tradition they all wear these crazy get ups! So we got pretty blind there and stumbled back to our hotel at about 6am, and feeling like we'd babysat for the past 5 hours hahahaha

Danyane's skiing is coming along beautifully. She's a fantastic skiier and very naturally talented. Which is great for me because I'm an impatient teacher! (as some of you may know hahaha). She now parrallels every turn, and bloody nice parrallels as well, and she was dominating red runs (between blue and black) by the end of the week. BTW she only has two speeds, fast and fastest!!! Her instructor was very skeptical at the start of the week when she wanted to join the intermediate class after only having ever skied for 5 days. He asked her to show him her stuff, and he said he couldn't believe it and she was probably the best student in the class.


Not too much more to report except that on our final night we managed to find a sushi bar!!!!! Oh our relief was intense, finally we could eat something that wasn't red meat and didn't come in 2kg serves. It was located in a hotel that cost about $9000USD per week to stay in, so we could only afford to eat there......once.

We finished up on Friday, and is always the way, it started snowing again :-p

You can find photos here

Photos

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