Bariloche March 6th - 11th

Friday, March 6th 2015

We have woken up to a sunny and warm day, a welcome change from the wind, cold and rain of Patagonia! Our plan while here is to finish the hike we started last month. But today we decided to take a day off.

Breakfast at the hostel consisted of croissants, sliced french bread and corn flakes. There is also tea, coffee, milk and homemade strawberry and raspberry jam and dulce de leche. No Argentine breakfast would be complete without an offering of dulce de leche (caramel spread). The hostel has placed it in a mason jar to give it a homemade look, like the jams, but I saw the package in the kitchen and it is just processed junk. We don't partake of the dulce de leche, but it's so popular here it has an aisle in the grocery store as big as the peanut butter selection in the US.

Today we planned to just go for a walk around town and get groceries and make food, but it was so nice out when we got down by the lake that we decided to stay there awhile. We took turns swimming in the very cold water. Jeff quickly made a friend, as he waded into the water a blond dog came barreling in after him. There were many dogs around. Whether dogs here have owners or not, they are free to roam where they please, and they can be quite fun to watch. Blond dog also came swimming with me and rolled around in the rocks afterward to dry off. All of the dogs seemed fascinated by the rocks, finding treasured ones and carrying them off to play with. Another dog barked at and bit every incoming wave. As you can imagine Jeff was in doggie heaven! (:

After our time at the lake we went out to eat at La Familia Weiss, a German restaurant that we really liked when we were here two years ago. I was able to find nice vegetarian food, veggie soup, salad and fried potato balls. The main reason we went back though was for their dark beer, which I remember really enjoying. We had two rounds of beer, but the waiter brought us a red beer the first time around and tried to convince us that it was the negra or black beer! He wouldn't admit fault! The second round was right, but he still charged us for both rounds. Annoying.

After lunch we visited the La Turista chocolate factory and got some assorted chocolates to take on our hike. I knew they weren't vegan, but ate them anyway! We had too many of them and felt ill the rest of the day! We need to quit bad foods, mainly sugar!! It's a slippery slope with me, once I start I spiral out of control! All those cakes on my birthday started it!!

In the evening we went to the grocery store to get food for our hike, which will be two nights, three days. The grocery stores here are always a pain to visit as they are always jam packed and check out takes forever. It's not just in Bariloche, but all over Argentina we experience this.

Dinner was fruit salad. And the rest of the evening was spent trying to book airfare. We used the hostel computer since it's nicer than looking at the phone, but some of the keys of the keyboard didn't work and the Internet was going really slow. We had some vouchers from Delta to use from when we got bought off our flight home from Alaska. We kept getting error messages when trying to enter them on their website, so I must have gone through the full booking process about 7 times on the slow computer before I finally got a confirmation screen! After 2 hours we had our flights from South America to New Jersey, New Jersey to San Diego and finally San Diego to Alaska. We got a good deal flying out of Asunción, Paraguay and combined with the travel vouchers, it was a great deal, at only $350 per ticket! The cheapest flights we could find out of Buenos Aires were $950 and not on Delta. Asunción is very near the final destination of our trip, Iguazú Falls, and it will be interesting to see a little of Paraguay before flying out.

Saturday, March 7th 2015

We had planned to start our hike today, but it was cool and cloudy and a slight bit windy and rainy. It would have been fine for hiking, but we didn't want fine, we wanted fantastic! So we decided to wait another day.

Our hostel didn't have room for us to stay another night, so we had to move hostels. We usually make our hostel reservations on Hostelworld, but you must make a 15% down payment when you do that, and it's paid at the official exchange rate of 8.5, instead of the blue dollar at 12.5, so we try to avoid having to do that whenever possible. So instead I made a reservation on booking.com, which is supposedly fee free. We chose one called Patanuk Hostel. It is Bariloche's only lake front hostel and received a good review from our Lonely Planet book, but many mixed reviews on Hostelworld. We decided to give it a try anyway. It was a 10 or 15 minute walk to get there. On the way I got really hot and sweaty and shaky! I used to get like that a lot when I hadn't eaten in a while, like hypoglycemia or something, but it stopped when I started eating vegan. Maybe it's a sign that my body is responding badly to eating garbage!!

When we checked into the hostel we were informed that instead of the normal price of 150 pesos, we would have to pay 236, "because it's always more expensive through booking." We weren't having that, so we asked if we could cancel the reservation and pay them. The guy agreed, but I had to do it myself though the confirmation sent to my email. The wifi wouldn't work, so I had to use the hostel computer, and it was really slow and my email didn't want to let me in on an unknown computer, so it took forever to cancel the reservation. All the while I'm feel faint and like I'm gonna collapse from the shakes! The hostel looked really shabby and dirty and we didn't even really want to stay there at all at that point, but we went through with paying after the Internet reservation was cancelled. We were shown to our room, which at noon still had a guy passed out in his underwear in one of the beds. The mattresses and sheets looked old and gross and it seemed a shame to be paying the same price as our previous hostel, which was really nice! .

We set our stuff down and went down to the small common area to eat a snack, so I could stop shaking. The wifi just wouldn't work at all and it seemed like it would be a terrible day when Jeff decided to ask if we could just have our money back and leave! We felt bad about it, but the guy agreed and let us go with our money. I think the reason for the mixed reviews of this place were that the good reviews were left by the young party people and the bad reviews by the people like us that would prefer some peace and quiet

After that we had to go to 3 more hostels, before we found space at Pudu Hostel, the same one we stayed in two years ago. After we were settled in we went to the kitchen to make lunch.

We had potato cubes with red pepper, carrots and chimmichurri. We also added a can of garbanzo beans and creamed corn that we found in the kitchen. Interestingly the canned cream corn contains no cream, just corn starch as a thickener! There is an abundance of it in the grocery store, often there is no plain corn, but tons of this stuff and I'd been avoiding it, because I assumed it contained dairy.

While we were cooking we met an Australian couple that were also cooking. They had a very beautiful package of vegetables. I couldn't resist asking where it came from, and they told me it was from a vegetable store that has the best produce they have seen on their whole trip! It seemed like me, they too are vegetable enthusiasts, so naturally we hit it off! We ended up in the kitchen talking to them much longer than we had planned.

Once we finally finished lunch we went out for bus tickets. We had thought we might go straight to Mendoza and skip the two remaining towns in the lakes district since we've already been to both of them, but we found out that there is only one company, Andesmar, that does the direct trip and it was a 4km walk one way to the bus terminal to buy tickets from them! So instead we bought tickets from Vía Bariloche because they have a sales office in town. We will be traveling 1 1/2 hours North to the next Lakes District town, Villa La Angostura.

After the bus tickets we changed more money and learned from the changer that the blue dollar is on the decline. It's now 12.8 in Buenos Aires, when it was 13.5 in January. The guy also told us it's expected to go down again. Buenos Aires is where you can get the best rate, everywhere else is lower, so we will probably be getting around 12 to 1 from now on. Luckily for us the prices of everything are going down since its low season and also the North of Argentina is known for being significantly cheaper than Patagonia. 

Our last errand was to go to the produce store. It was indeed the most beautiful produce we've ever laid eyes on in Argentina! I went a little nuts and spent over $20! We got a tray of mixed berries, 2 plums, 2 nectarines, 2 figs!!, 2 corn on the cobs, 2 avocados, an organic heirloom tomato!!, a carrot, a beet, an onion, spinach!!, a red bell pepper and some purple cabbage. We carried our prized possessions home to our hostel and prepared 2 gigantic salads! We were joined again in our preparations by the Australians. We had a nice time eating and talking to them. They have done extensive traveling, which made for very interesting conversation. What started out as an awful day turned out quite nice!

<The bowls look deceivingly small! The salads probably took an hour to eat!>

Sunday, March 8th 2015

We decided to quit white bread hostel breakfast for a day and instead had brown rice, banana, cinnamon and mixed berries. The Australians, who are also very dissatisfied with the standard Argentinean breakfast were just enthralled by our breakfast!

We were pleased with ourselves for getting up and getting going pretty early, but the bus we needed to get on ended up being very late! We waited at the bus stop for about 45 minutes before we figured that maybe the schedule was different than normal because it was Sunday. So we walked down the street to the tourist office to ask about it and they said it shouldn't be any different that any other day! So we left there and were continuing walking down the street to the next bus stop, when we spotted the bus approaching! We were between stops and didn't expect the bus to pick us up, but Jeff made a praying sign to the driver, and amazingly he stopped! Not a full stop, but a slow roll, and we were able to jump in!

It was already 11 by the time we started hiking. We hiked up the river valley that we hiked out of when we were here before. It took us about 4 1/2 hours to get to the Refugio. Along the way we took several nice long rest breaks. Near the end we had nice views t of the mountains we hiked over and the crazy river valley we hiked down during the last day of our trek here a month or so ago. It was sunny and warm, no clouds and no wind, so warm that we could wear t-shirts and shorts! Luckily there was nice shade most of the way.

For food we brought along pita breads and avocado, trail mix and nectarines for lunch. The nectarines turned out to be the best we have ever had the pleasure of eating! For dinner we had polenta, canned beans and green bell pepper.

We found a real nice spot to build our tent tucked in next to a dwarf lenga forest and behind a rock wall wind break with views of the Laguna Negra and Cerro Negro. We went to bed feeling well from a day of very healthy eating! 

<While we were having one of our rest breaks, a large tree fell over into the river!>

<A nice cascade in the river. There is much less water in the rivers and water falls than there was a month ago. Most of the snow fields are gone.>

<View of the valley that never ended on our last hike! In the top middle you can see a flat ridge between two peaks, that is Cerro Navidad and the screw slope below it is where we made our descent.>

Monday, March 9th 2015

It remained wind free and warm all night. We slept in until after 8 because we were in no rush to sit around at the next refugio. It was warm enough when we got out of the tent that we didn't need hats or gloves, amazing! And it was clear and sunny again!

For breakfast we had oats, canned peaches (La Gioconda brand), chia seeds, coconut, raisins & tea. We decided to give the Argentinean canned peaches a try, and to our delight, they are just as wonderful as the Chilean ones. All of the stone fruit products in Argentina come from the Mendoza area, which is also a wine region. We are excited to go there and find incredible deals on canned peaches!!

<Hiking away from the refugio.>

Today ended up being an incredibly difficult hike, and even though it didn't look like there was much elevation gain or loss on the map, there was plenty of it! We started by hiking 2 hours up and away from the Laguna to some amazing views west of the Andes and into Chile, with Mt Tronador volcano dominating the view.

<Laguna Lluvó to the left, Mt Tronador in the middle and Lago Frias to the right>

<Jeff at the top of what we believe to be Cerro Bailey Willis. Many mountains, lakes, towns and other things down here have strange western names.>

<Looking back down to Laguna Negra and Cerro Negro. All kinds of crazy rock at the top of the mountains we were on.>

From the top of Cerro Bailey Willis, we had to descend for an hour way down to the bottom of a valley.

<The bottom of the valley is on the right where is looks a little green. Views of Nahuel Huapi Lake in the background.>

After the descent we stopped for an hour for lunch in what seemed like an oasis in the desert! A nice shady spot in a cove of trees that would make an excellent campsite, complete with (an almost dry!) nearby stream! We sat on the ground and rested our backs up against big logs and watched a neat bird that digs with his feet to find food! Lunch was more pita bread and avocado and trail mix with apples.

<I am wearing the soft shirt I found aging in the sun on Mt Piltriquitron in El Bolsón last month. It says rock to the rhythm on it, which I don't care for.>

The mountains were quite an impressive sight as we walked out of the valley after lunch. Looking at the pictures afterward, we really aren't sure where we ended up. We took pictures of where we thought the trail might go, low points in the mountains. But we seem to have no photos of where it actually went because we would never have expected to trail to take the route that it did! It went up and up for two hours! It was very steep and rocky and in some places it was loose scree with very little traction, and I fell twice! I lived though, and at the top the views were incredible in every direction! We didn't see anyone all day until we got to the top and saw a total of 3 people that came from the other side.

<Views after lunch. We ended up somewhere up around those jagged peaks.>

<Tronador came back into view shortly after we began the climb.>

<A view looking up. Our ascent route is somewhere to the right.>

<Looking down at lunch valley and across to the mountain we descended from, it's just left of the middle, a u shaped saddle between 2 peaks.>

<Constantly looking up for the next trail marker, red spray paint on rocks, and thinking: where are we going!? This can't possibly be the trail!! We continued up to the right around the dark rock formation.>

<So close, but losing traction.>

<View of the top, Pico Turista. There is a stool at the top and at this moment, there is a man, a crazy trail runner man sitting on the stool taking a selfie. He ran up from the other side and is carrying nothing.>

<Panorama from the top with Mt Tronador, Volcan Puntiagudo, some other snowy volcanic peak that we don't know the name of and Lago Nahuel Huapi.>

<Looking back at the many layers of mountains we climbed over throughout the trek.>

<Lago Nahuel Huapi, Bariloche is near the top right. All of the islands below make up the route of the Circuito Chico bike ride we did in January.>

<The farthest away layer of mountains is Cerro Catedral where we started the trek in January.>

We took a good long rest at the top to admire the view. Then from there is was an hour and fifteen minutes down to the next refugio. We were very tired for the last downhill. It was very steep and was down solid rock, almost like cliffs, but not quite that bad. Even though the hike was really difficult, this was easily the best day of the whole trek!

We could see the Refugio also the whole way down, which was a real tease! When we got there we set our tent in an exposed area, too tired to look any further, and hoped it wouldn't get too windy overnight. We had polenta and lentils and red bell pepper for dinner. Then made some chamomile tea and sat on the rocks and looked out over on the view of the lake until it got dark.

Tuesday, March 10th 2015

The wind picked up over night. It wasn't enough to wake me up, but enough to blow dust into the tent! We awoke with a fine layer over everything. We have now wished many times that we had a sturdy 4 season, non-mesh tent! 

<Looking back up at the Refugio from below. There are beds for 100 in there, but a German guy we talked to was the only one in there last night!>

We got another sunny and warm windless day. The down hill was very dusty and steep and took us two hours. We were glad for shade most of the way. We felt bad for all of the people going up. Most trails here seem to go straight up without switch backs and get really eroded as a result.

Once we made it to the bottom and back to the road we stopped on some logs by the river and had lunch and rinsed all the dust off our legs in the river. Then started walking down the road to where the bus would pass by. We were ahead of the next schedule bus so rather than wait at the stop, we decided to keep going. We ended up walking for almost 3 hours, and 9 km along the highway to where another road joins in and more buses pass! Before we got to the intersection of the two roads we didn't see a single bus pass going either direction, even though there should have been several! We think that now that we are out of high season there are fewer buses, but the schedule was never updated! The walk wasn't bad. It was mostly shady without too many hills and we took advantage by stopping at a beach on the way and going swimming.

<Apples on the tree to the far right!>

We arrived back to town just before 6, just in time for a victory happy hour beer and french fries at Manush, one of many microbreweries in town. Really good homemade french fries with spicy tomato dip and two beers for 120 peso, or about $10!

Then it was back to the veggie store for a real feast: green beans, pico de gallo salsa, veggie patties, tomatoes, corn on the cob, avocados, onion, white nectarines, plums, blueberries, and a pre-made salad of carrots, peas and Brussels sprouts. We were pleased to find that our friends the Australians were still around and we enjoyed cooking and eating with them again and comparing our purchases from the Verdulería (veg store)!

Wednesday, March 11th 2015

We got up early today so that we would have time to go to a bakery before we got on the bus to Villa La Angostura. The bakery is called Lo Integral, and is a whole grain, mostly vegan bakery. According to reviews I'd read, you could get whole grain croissants, empanadas, cookies, quick breads and many other items. I knew I had to visit this place before leaving Bariloche! And I was not disappointed! Once I had thoroughly examined all of the options, I proceeded to have a shopping spree! Jeff rolled his eyes and sighed and attempted to stop me, but he didn't stand a chance! I got a loaf of almond sweet/quick bread, a fig newton type bar thing filled with apples and raspberry, 2 empanadas, a veggie burger, a whole bunch of crackers, an assortment of cookies and 4 sandwich rolls! 

We walked back to the hostel with my very heavy bag of lovelies! And we ate the apple raspberry bar for breakfast with plums and blueberries from the produce store along with corn flakes mixed with apple juice from the hostel breakfast. With a few minutes to spare we said goodbye to the Australians, gathered our belongings and called for a taxi.

The bus left at 9:45 AM. It was a scenic 1 1/2 ride along the lake to the next town to the North, Villa La Angostura. Another beautiful, sunny day.