A taste of Chile then onto the Wine & Lake districts of Argentina

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Chile: Santiago

We arrive in Santiago Chile, after a 13 hour flight from Auckland, and as it’s been an overnight flight it doesn’t feel too bad although the jet lag kicks in later. We fly with LAN Chile & find the service & entertainment a bit poor given the length of the flight. The airport is pretty impressive and seems to be quite modern. We then catch an airport cab (standard fare 5,400 Pesos each) to get us into the centre of the city where our hostel is.

Our first impression from the airport is that Santiago is like a mix of Mexico City & Buenos Aires - it’s a sprawling city with lots of Renaissance buildings and Plazas but there also seems to be quite a lot of poverty and decrepit areas. Hostal Plaza de Armas is on the main square, 6 floors up with fab views across the city to the mountains (and not bad at $US29 per night inc breakfast). The Square has a central fountain, and is filled with activity from local artists and street entertainers during the day - and at night the jetsam & flotsam of life!

We take a walk around the central area & are surprised at how many people warn us to take care with our camera & day rucksack - not the best intro to Santiago or Chile! We make two great finds: first is the fish market (the metal framework for which was made in Birmingham) which has amazing fish and other market stalls and also many fish restaurants - some touristy but many local - the speciality is paila de congrio (eel soup). The second is La Piojera - a local bar where they serve Terremoto - local wine with a scoop of ice cream in it! (Oh yes, are we going to try this at home says C!!) The trick is that it must be mixed - it transforms into something completely delish. We also try Chicha - Chilean cider with an orange slice; not bad but Terremoto wins hands down. We go to Pailas Blancas in the market for lunch where we have seafood stew (chupe marina) & paila marina (seafood soup) - no congrio left - served with local sweet white wine. We return to the hostel & enjoy an afternoon nap as a result!

The hostel is above an archway filled with food stalls and cheap restaurants and our favourite is Rincon del Portal - which does a great lomo a la pobre (steak with onions, chips & egg), and happily does take outs for us which we take up to the hostel and eat overlooking the square which really is very attractive at night. Other excellent food here is Lomito de Palta (steak burger with avocado) & Italiano hotdogs (also with avocado).

We test our Spanish buying our return flight tickets from Punta Arenas to Santiago with Sky Airline - $99 each - and enjoy coffees at Café Haiti. Santiago is renowned for coffee shops staffed by short skirted or bikini clad girls & only frequented by men. Haiti is a more conservative version where women are welcome too & the skirts aren’t quite so short. Does good coffee too.

Unfortunately, on Valentine’s Day whilst enjoying a couple of Terremoto’s with Peter & Marta from Slovakia who we met in the hostel our rucksack is stolen from under the table when C goes to the toilet. None of us has noticed anything - but there are a bunch of young guys on the next table who seem to protest (too much) that it wasn’t them. On reflection we should have got the police in immediately to search the place & these guys - but we are shocked by the events and make our way to the police to report the theft. They don’t really seem interested - so we log the event, get a receipt and go off to reorganize.

Amongst other things M loses his glasses again and we lose the memory card with all our photo’s of NZ. Gutted! We also lose a memory stick with details of all our credit cards etc on so after another mad search in the area around the bar we have a scramble to cancel all our credit cards. We decide to stay another day in Santiago whilst we sort everything out & decide, in view of our more limited funds availability, to go home a week earlier so contact Qantas to make the change & then have another go at Spanish to change our Sky airlines flight.

Thank the Lord for Skype though. At least we can make very cheap calls on the laptop to sort everything out and warn the girls of our earlier return. Then we make the most of Santiago & visit the Museum of Pre Colombian history which is free on Sunday - really interesting and some excellent exhibits, especially the Mummy’s.

Valparaiso - The UNESCO Heritage city

We are really looking forward to getting out of Santiago & move on to Valparaiso (or Valpo as it’s known), which many rate. We leave the hostel early & walk to the Metro nearby. It’s a few stops to Pajarito, the main bus station where we catch a bus to Valpo. The bus trip from Santiago costs $8200 (about £16 for the two of us) and takes 2 hours. The landscape is initially quite urban with lots of low level houses on the outer ring of the capital. It then becomes mountainous and green with small holdings along the way with horses and cattle.

We check into our Guesthouse (not hostel this time) called El Rincon Marino, 4 blocks away from the bus stop. It’s a lovely place run by Luis & Marisa who live on part of the ground floor. The rate for the large double room includes breakfast from 7.30 am onwards. The kitchen is a bit small but other facilities are good. There’s a TV in the room - cable with BBC News/CNN & films etc so it’s a useful distraction after the events of the last few days. Surprisingly we are 2 of only three foreigners’ here, the other being Eimir, an Irish woman at the end of her travels. The rest of the guests are Chilean families. As we have no credit cards etc we decide to cook at the guesthouse to try and manage our budget a little tighter. We don’t want to compromise on some of the trips etc we’d planned. This pays off though as chatting to Eimir we get lots of tips & information about trekking in Torres del Paine National Park.

We decide to get out & check out the city. It’s such a relief after spending most of the last few days in the hostel in Santiago. The place has a great feel to it. The city is essentially built up on the surrounding hill sides with the main squares/streets etc between the residential highlands and the sea. This used to be a big shipping port & is still the centre of the Chilean naval HQ & operations. We come across a café selling some good looking ice cream which C has to try - the guy gives us a discount to encourages us to come back for dinner. Everything here seems cheaper than Santiago & nicer.

Valpo is famous for it’s funicular railways up to the Cerros (hillside neighbourhoods). The main ones which we visit are Concepcion, Espirito Santo & Militaria. Concepcion is packed with grand houses, lots of colourful claddings (many of the houses are weatherboard or corrugated iron clad) and quite a few murals. It has a lovely feel - quite alternative and almost Totnesian. By the Alegre funicular, which we take down, is a fantastic villa at the top - a museum but closed for refurb when we visit - with wonderful gargoyles and stone carvings around the roof. The funicular workings are open to view here - fascinating but not terrifically reassuring given the steepness and length of the climb. Militaria, by the port area is smaller with local market stalls and views along the coast. Espirito Santo is marketed as an open air museum with a trail of murals to follow. Some are excellent street art but quite a few have been graffiti’d over and some are just rubbish!

We find a great local bar for lunch in the market area - we‘re the only non-Chileans. The menu is written on the wall and sounds great though when we get to order they do in fact only have 3 options; two stews and empanadas. We go for a stew and empanada combo, with a local beer, and they’re terrific. No idea what the stew was called but it had meat, corn, potato and an egg in it!

We enjoyed our two days here and think about returning at the end of our journey before we fly home. For now though it’s off to Mendoza in Argentina, via the Andes, from where we’ll travel down to Patagonia to finish our grand adventure trekking in Torres del Paine.

Into Argentina

Mendoza - the Malbec wine region

We take the bus from Valparaiso across the Andes on an 8 hour journey starting at 8am. As such we have to leave our hostel at 7.30am - too early for the inclusive breakfast - or so we thought but the landlady (Marisa) who gave us an early morning call got some food ready. At the busy bus station it was a job finding out where the bus would be & when. The ticket office was most unhelpful - maybe because we bought our tickets on line using Sarah’s credit card details as a way of making our funds stretch further. (We are still feeling the after shock of the theft & it has definitely made a difference to our mood despite Valpo being a nicer place than Santiago). Despite everyone’s advice that the bus will arrive at bay 8 it turns up at bay 2, 5 mins before departure time & it’s only by luck that we find out where it is.

It’s all aboard & then off on the journey. By the way the journey could be made overnight but the scenery on the drive is such that we would definitely recommend doing the trip by day. We are soon making our way towards the Andes which is essentially the border between Chile & Argentina. As we wind our way upwards, the mountains take on a beautiful air of serenity with some of the tallest ones covered in snow. We eventually arrive at the Border crossing which is essentially a very, very large warehouse looking building where we have to get off and queue to get our stamps to allow us out of Chile & another queue to get let into Argentina where they take a random check on all bags to ensure no food or plant material is being taken from one country into the other. The Argentineans are more relaxed about this - whilst the Chileans take it much more seriously & border crossings into Chile have been known to take up to 5 hours!!! Hence bus journey times across the borders are usually referred to in ranges of hours (6 to 8 or 7 to10 hours etc). We obviously had a good day as or formalities took about 1½ hours. The good thing is that there was a café at the entry point that took Pesos of either country & the “Warehouse“had good toilets - what a relief!!!

Once we started the journey on the Argentinean side the Andes seemed to change in shape & make up and was so impressive to be awe inspiring. The sheer variety of rock formations - in structure & colours made it a geologists’ paradise. We soon came upon the Puente Del Inca one of the country‘s striking natural wonders. It‘s a stone bridge over the Rio de las Cuevas which is a dazzling orange from the sediment deposited by warm sulphuric waters. We travel through Parque Provincial Aconcagua hugging the Chilean border which is quite beautiful with many mountain tops still covered in snow - in the height of summer! We eventually come into low land which is initially very beautiful, these are the entry points to some of the best skiing resorts in the area and then we move onto the area near Mendoza - the wine region (which is less attractive than the NZ wine regions) and arrive at Mendoza bus station at about 4 pm. It’s a huge complex and is about 15 minutes walk from the centre of the city/town.

Unfortunately our place - the Hostel Lagares on Corrientes is at the other end of town so we amble along for a little longer. They are expecting us as we had booked ahead (most of the other places in town were full or didn’t reply which we find annoying). We get a warm welcome & a double room with TV which doesn’t work too well as someone has ripped out the aerial. The air con isn’t terribly efficient either but we have a fan to help it along - it’s generally quite hot here - only about 25 - 28 degrees & apparently in mid summer it’s easily past 40 a lot of the time. Wow!

Our priority is to get to a Western Union office as we have arranged for Sarah to send us some funds just in case so that we aren’t scrimping & counting the Pesos all the time & to allow us to enjoy the last few weeks of our journey. We rush off to a post office which according to the web is the best place to get the money. No such luck. They redirect us to another office which thankfully is open till 8pm. So it’s rush to the other end of town again & standing in the wrong queue we figure out that various forms need filling in. When served at last the service was ace - all done in about 5 minutes. Amazing thing this Western Union network - it’s all computerised & we could have picked up the funds within 15 mins of Sarah paying the funds on line on her credit card. They even text her to say we have collected the money instantaneously. Wow, service excellence or what!!!

One thing about Mendoza is that it feels like a place that is not sure if it’s a town trying to be a city or vice versa. The central boulevard (Avenida San Martin) is wide and has lovely cover by mature trees - just as well given the heat. However, the road is partially dug up for repair while we’re here so it looks a mess. The main street is full of shops selling shoes, clothes, lingerie, electrical goods & a few coffee bars. The side streets are more interesting for ice creams, cafes, restaurants & leather goods (a local speciality). The main market, Mercardo Central, is also down a side street and is a fun place to visit. We found it on the off chance & are we glad we did - the array of food is brilliant (cooked & fresh stuff). We ended up with some freshly spit roasted lamb & baby pig - pretty awesome at little cost. It’s surprising to get suckling pig in restaurants let alone market counters - the woman who served us also offered to take a picture of us to record the event - she spoke good English as well which helped!!

The main square & trendy café area is Plaza Independencia (the square) & Avenida Sarmiento (full of bars/cafes/restaurants). They are more lively & lit up at night. The Square hosts an evening craft market on weekends - it’s quite nice but low key. There’s a group playing really foot tapping popular music on Andean instruments that draw a big crowd.

We enjoy some fantastic ice cream - hazelnut & macadamia cream - and at night we go to a parilla (BBQ meat joint) as this is what Argentina is famous for. The hostel recommends one that is used by locals & is reasonably priced. It’s ok; we try the usual steak etc. It’s not quite Buenos Aires & the wine seems surprisingly expensive given that this is after all the wine region to be in.

Having come all this way we decide to do the full day Wine tour for 150 Pesos each booked via our hostel. We are picked up at 8.30am and after about an hours drive are taken in a mini van with other tourists first to the Weinert Winery, which is one of the big boys in the region. The building is impressive; however our wine tour is pretty disappointing. The guide is a bit stiff and the wine made available for tasting was really crap - many blends & a juice. We were all pretty angry and said so to the tour guide who was pretty embarrassed. The next one was Viniterra - a totally different experience. They are a smaller outfit but their guide was engaging, informative & fun. Their Malbec Roble (which means made in oaked barrels) was great. We tried 3 varieties & they were all good. The best being the barrel matured wines. The last stop was Bodega Carmine Grenata, a rather small but great family owned winery. We learn that Malbec is the registered DOC (worldwide) wine of Mendoza only; other wines are Cabernet Sauvignon which is the second most popular locally, Tempranillo, & Rincon Famoso (a specialist grape done only by Lopez but quite drinkable). Most of the wineries in Argentina are owned by outsiders - that is the French, Italians, Germans, Brazilian etc. Very few are still Argentinean owned. The tour is finished off with a fab all you can eat lunch - meats, empanadas, salads, cazuela, pasta and pud - with lots of local vino. Seems to work out quite well as we have a long (14 hours) bus journey that evening to the lake district and the main centre of the action at Bariloche and sleep is no problem! We travel with Andesmar - one of the big operators which have an online booking facility. However, beware some of their fares are cheaper being paid in cash at the bus depot office.

San Carlos de Bariloche - The Argentinean Lake District

Buses in Argentina are pretty standard, comfortable & affordable. We travel via Neuquén a big commercial centre where we leave Ruta 40 the highway famous for it’s scenery and the one that Che travelled on a motorbike in his student days. Welcome to the region of Patagonia which is vast.

We come across Dinosaur Parque Nahuelito where they found the remains of a dinosaur bigger than T Rex quite recently in 1988. It is now a tourist area with many locals visiting. The landscape is pretty bleak for miles on end. We eventually arrive at San Carlos Bariloche (just referred to as Bariloche) at lunchtime. The bus stop is tiny for the many buses trying to come in & they all start queue up to get into their bays. After getting off & grabbing our bags we decide not to wait for the local bus (Urbanos which comes every 20 mins) so we do what all the locals do & hop into a cab to town. It’s 12 Pesos to the 1004 hostel which is in the centre of town.

The hostel comes highly recommended by other travellers, so we are somewhat taken aback to see a 10 storey block which looks uninspiring. We go in & have to take the “service lift” to the 10th floor as we had rucksacks. We get to the entrance & then are so warmly welcomed and enter another world where everywhere you look there is a view of the beautiful and very large Lago Nahuel Huapi (the native Mapuche name) which is 100km long and surrounded by snow covered mountains & small islands scattered around it. Awesome - so this is what the fuss was all about. We have a lovely room overlooking the main square & the lake. The rate is $120 Pesos per night & breakfast is included (standard fare - bread, marg, jam, tea/coffee). As it’s warm we sleep with the window open - a big mistake as the young ones make a huge racket with cars & motorbikes very late at night & very early in the morning. The lake itself though is beautiful and the colours at sunrise and sunset are magical.

We decide to take it easy for a few days & do some sight seeing. The town is surprisingly like an alpine town in Europe. It was built by the Germans who have a large community still here. M finds this a bit disappointing & feels it’s a long way to come for a cuckoo clock or hear an Argentinean yodel!!! The place is largely a tourist area for the rich from Buenos Aires who flock here in the summer & winter (for skiing). The square is supposed to have been built by a famous architect - yet it looks like a tacky reproduction of something from Austria/Germany. Most evenings there were small community events - like Morris dancing - Argentinean style off course. There are also a few very large St Bernard dogs wandering around with their owners who take pictures of tourists with them for a living. On the land beside the square there is a daily craft market - which isn’t brilliant. The redeeming feature though for C is that Bariloche is also famous for its chocolate. There is a chocolate store every 20 meters. One of the most famous & impressive is Mamushka which is very colourful and has mamuskha dolls spinning on the top of the entrance. C being C has to have some - so it’s indulgence time for her. Anything to keep her quiet is M’s philosophy when it comes to chocolate!! She’s in 7th heaven!!!


We mainly eat in - the Anonima supermarket is great & cheap. We also find a supermarket with Viniterra Roble wine at a reduced price - we can’t believe our luck and enjoy a few bottles. The cooking area at the hostel is huge. The staff all live in and most have been here 5 years plus. They are very helpful and treat the place as their home and cook with the residents to make meals for themselves each night. There is a balcony where you can go & get some great views of the surrounding landscape. We do however get a great pizza take out from El Mundo one night and also discover Juaja ice cream store for the most amazing nut ice cream.


The town is full of visitors from Buenos Aires (Porteños) as its school holidays & many families are soaking up the sun & enjoying the natural beauty of the area. It definitely a tourist place with higher than average prices. Needless to say that all the time we are here the weather is hot ranging from 28 to 30+ degrees.

We decide that we are going to try our hand at Paragliding from Cerro Otto (the highest point in the area) overlooking the lake. We book via the hostel and get picked up at 8.30 am by Ernesto, the main man. The weather has a big say on whether or not you take off at all. If it’s too windy or raining there’s no take off. However, we are somewhat lucky as the day we choose is ok.

We meet met up with the other instructor, Frederico, & their driver who clearly was a paragliding junkie of about 75 years old. He does the driving & odd jobs, he seems to get a free go each time they are up the mountain. Today he is going solo for his first time. After a rickety bus ride uphill on very unsealed roads we get to the top where the ski runs start & the cable car drops people off. As the wind is low we trek a further ½ mile to get to a better & higher spot where things look promising. The one draw back is that we are literally on the side of the mountain with precarious footholds off the cliff side. C gets harnessed up and eventually takes off. The secret apparently is to start running off the cliff on the command of the instructor & keep on going till you discover that you are running on thin air as you are now airborne!!! They are pretty cool about taking your camera with you so you can take pictures of the scenery and of yourself in mid flight - which is all very well if you have a pocket digital camera - not a Canon 40D which is what M has. It’s an amazing experience with fantastic views of the lake and surrounding landscape. And feeling the thermals lift you is awesome. Will definitely do this again!

Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi

One of the main attractions in the area is to travel the road known as Ruta Siete Lagos or the Route of the Seven Lakes. So we go to the local travel agent & book onto the day trip for the next day. We are told to be ready at the hostel by 8am. At 8.30am someone finally arrives who is running late but clearly looking for us. We hand him our voucher which he takes & we are off. We discover that the small bus we are in is full of local folks - mainly from Buenos Aires on holiday & the guide only speaks Spanish so we have to listen intently to get a gist of what is happening. After about an hour we arrive at a National park where the locals only pay 30 Pesos each but foreigners pay 90 Pesos each. This is unexpected and just as well we had some money to cover this as this was totally unexpected - which we told the guide about & he apologized and said we should have been alerted to this payment by the travel agent.

The NP is beautiful and we come across some awesome sights, with glacial lakes of deep blue - the largest being Lago Nahuel Huapi (100km long & covers more than 500sq km). To the west are high peaks that form the boundary with Chile. The tallest is Monte Tronador which is quite spectacular in the distance with it’s snow covered peak. It’s pictures all around.

We also briefly stop at the Cascada Los Alceres - lovely waterfall. It’s here that we encounter Pilar & her mother Patricia who can’t get their camera to work so we offer to take some snaps of them and email the results to their email address. Pilar is about 12 years old & tries to practice her English with us - as much as we try and practice our Spanish with her and her mother. She is a bright girl & full of life. We did end up taking quite a few pictures of mother & daughter to help them remember their special trip. They appreciated the email and have invited us to come & visit/stay with them if we are ever in BA again. Shame we didn’t do the trip in reverse!! They also introduce us to Tortas Fritos - a local specialty like a fried donut - delish!

We make our way to the Tronador glacier not far away which is quite impressive with large black icebergs floating in a lake below the mountain side. Even though we’ve been up close & personal at Fox, it was still impressive. Then it’s the off to the centre of the park where there are log cabins & a restaurant/café where we break for a late lunch at about 3 pm.
We have an hour’s break till 4 pm which gives us time for lunch - burger & chips and a walk alongside some waterfalls about a mile away. By now we are wondering when are we likely to get to San Martin de Los Andes which is supposed to be a pretty place on the Ruta so we ask the guide. Lo & behold we discover then that we are on the wrong trip after all this & he didn’t realize as he hadn’t checked our voucher & neither had we as he had us on his travel list. Big laughter all round when he tells all our fellow travellers we are on the wrong trip! Hey ho!

It’s off to the travel agent as soon as we get back. He had rung ahead to tell them about the administrative cock up. So they are ok about either a refund or putting us on the trip we wanted. We agree to go in two days time as we have the paragliding planned. They also after some persuasion pay us back the money we had to pay for the park entry. So all in all we end up with a free days outing at their expense and beautiful it was too. In fact as it turns out it was much better than the route of the 7 lakes - so given a choice we would recommend people go on this trip as it is significantly better and more beautiful.

Ruta de Los Siete Lagos

So it’s two days later - same time, same place & we are determined to ensure we get on the right trip this time. Surprise, surprise - it’s the same guide but the right trip. So we set off at 8 am with another bus load of locals - with us the only 2 foreigners. After about an hour driving through the Alpine countryside we get to Villa La Angostura.

Villa La Angostura

VLA is at the NW end of Lago Nahuel Huapi and is a tranquil resort of attractive wooden carved & polished cabins. It’s about 250 metres long and very touristy. We stop off for about an hour and have some coffee to wake us up. M gets bitten by a wasp on the elbow as he relaxes into a chair. 1 nil to him & goodbye wasp after an initial sharp intake of breath! We hop onto our little bus again and make our way via the lakes to San Martin de Los Andes

Saint Martin de los Andes

This is a fashionable & relatively costly mountain resort on a small bay on Lago Lacar. It has a certain quaint charm but the town is walkable in about ½ hour. The park near the centre is lovely and the beach by the lakeside had many locals sunbathing. The place is famous as a ski resort and one Ernesto Che Guevara who actually stayed here one night when he did his trip recorded in “The motorcycle diaries”. The place he stayed in is now a Che Museum - not sure how much he could have done or left behind as a latter day backpacker. But hey it’s good for tourism!

We try to go to a quirky bistro mentioned in the LP guide but it’s hardly got any food available from the menu so we move on and discover a lovely take out place nearby. So it’s an impromptu picnic lunch picnic from the Café that did a Barbacoa (slow cooked BBQ) of beef and chicken with some marinated whole beans and spinach pie. It’s hot and we find a nice shaded spot in the park and enjoy our food washed down with a great big bottle of beer in a brown paper bag as we weren’t sure of the rules about drinking in public!

The bus trip back takes us through Lanin province and the Parque Nacional Lanin, passing the volcano on the way. We pass a herd of guanaco - a bit like Llamas which are indigenous to the area - and try to take loads of pics. Get very bored of them by the time we’ve finished in Patagonia!

Next day we are moving on. We haven’t been struck by Bariloche but the hostel was superb and the team great.

El Bolson

We catch a cab with a Swiss guy to the bus terminal as the public buses are taking ages to turn up & so as not to miss the bus we are booked on. We take the Via Bariloche bus from Bariloche to El Bolson for 35 Peso for 2. It takes about 2 hours depending on how often they stop for local folk. It’s an interesting ride with more of the same - Andes mountains & lakes.

We get into town at about 11.45am & go to the tourist info office which is quite informative. One observation: what we do notice on the country maps in the Tourist centre & elsewhere in the country is that The Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas) are shown as belonging to Argentina not the UK. No-one seemed to be hostile to us Brits though thankfully.

It’s market day in town so there are many craft & food stall around the main park, overlooked by high mountains. It looks impressive & El Bolson feels more traditionally Argentinean unlike Bariloche. It feels good & peaceful.

We get the local Urbano bus for 4 Pesos to the hostel 3 km out of town but with a good reputation called El Pueblito. It’s a big log cabin style house in the middle of the countryside off a dirt track - but the bus drops you off at the entrance. It’s hot (28 - 30 degrees). This is real rural Argentinean life. The bus only runs every hour; the people are a mix of Spanish descendents and local tribes (they look like the Andeans of Peru or Central America). They are descendents of the Mapuche tribe that have lived in this region for centuries. Their language is still alive and their heritage well respected and on show in this part of the world. This bit of Argentina feels so different; there are local farms with real life Gauchos on horses doing their work.

We go back into town to sample the delights of the market including a try of the local brew called Parapapoto. They do ale, a rojo and a dark (similar to Guinness) beer. This is also Patagonian lamb country so later we have a local lamb sandwich (15 pesos) washed down with a Quilmes (4.20 pesos) from La Anonima Supermarket who we have become rather dependent on and fond of. We also buy some Marcus, the reasonably decent Patagonian Malbec which is quite good, to take back with a home cooked dinner.

El Bolson has a reputation as a new age settlers town with a laid back feel and we can see why. It’s apparently the first place in the country that declared itself a nuclear free zone. They seem to be more socially aware & were in the middle of their festival to celebrate sexual equality & diversity. They also had a teachers and students (secondary school kids) strike march for better educational conditions etc. Clearly a happening place.

As a matter of historical note, apparently a few hours from here via Esquel (from where you can take La Trochita - the old Patagonian express - to El Maiten) and nearby in Chubut’s Cholila Valley is the site of the hideout of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid before they were forced to move to Bolivia where they were killed by the army. Trevelin a little way down the country is noted for the local Welsh community who has been here for decades but despite C’s roots we can’t find time to detour there.

We spend a lazy day at the Hostel - they have large grounds with lots of trees (pine) and hammocks between many of them - a good chill out zone.

Next day we are heading off for El Calafate in the deep south. As it’s Market day again we decide have some lunch from the stalls & ice cream before we catch the bus. We try out the local speciality, steak Milanese which is really rather good & we are sorry we have left it so late in our time in Argentina to try this. We also treat ourselves to the yummy ice cream from Juaja.

The bus journey is 26 hours with Marga via Rio Gallegos. This is the easier route (motorways & sealed roads) with more comfortable travel - Cama & Semi Cama. The alternative which is popular for the rough set is the trip down Ruta 40 which is the road that goes all the way down Argentina along the Andes, but it’s mainly unsealed roads & ordinary buses take 30+ hours with no stops or food etc. Also most of the travel is at night so the best bits to see are missed. We’re not sure why this seems so popular - Che & “The Motorcycle Diaries” may have something to do with this.

So, it’s down to Southern Patagonia where the scenery and air are very different but not the gringos. See you there …………. Ciao

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