Patagonia

The 19 hour bus ride lived up to our expectations. Started off on a good note when, not more than 30 minutes into the journey, there was a crash on the lower level. Turned out a rock had broken one of the huge windows on the bus so we had to turn around and switch craft. Neither of us slept much at all during the night as usual cause we kept stopping and they kept turning on the lights, yelling, etc. When we finally got to Bariloche we were exhausted and got a cab to our hostel where we had reservations only to find out they had no double rooms and had made a mistake on the hostels.com website. Luckily they were extremely friendly and let us have an entire dorm room for 4 to ourselves, bathroom included. Bariloche was a great time. The city is right on a huge lake in northern patagonia and the setting was amazing. Snow capped mountains all around, etc... We took a tour the second day to a mountain in the national park called Mt. Troubador to see a black glacier and take in the views. We were the last ones to be picked up by the tour bus in the morning and when we got on, the bus was freezing. Everyone was bundled up and surley. It was probably in the low 30´s outside, twas frost in the air. The tour guide assured us that the bus just needed to warm up but what neither the guide nor the driver knew at that point was that the radiator was frozen and would never defrost. Needless to say we had a freezing first couple hours till a german couple complained enough to have another bus sent for us. The rest of the tour was great. It ended up being a perfect day and the mountain was beautiful and we stopped at a great place to get lunch with a view of the mountain and great hamburgers. Bariloche is the Argentinian version of a yuppie ski town complete with way too many chocolate shops and fur stores. It has some great restaurants and we found one called Familia Weiss where we got local trout and wild boar and some microbrew beer (impossible to find anywhere else). It was fantastic. Crossed the border with Chile on Saturday. We had made reservations at these cabins in a small, out of the way town which got an interesting write up in lonely planet. We were the only people who had to get off the bus early so we told the driver where to let us off. Unfortunately the guy who sold us the tickets wrote the wrong town on the tickets and this all boiled down to us being let off the in the middle of nowhere, 30km from the town with our cabin. Initially we were a bit frustrated but we made our way to a nearby resort (bizarrely located in the middle of nowhere) and they told us we could catch a small local transport headed for our town Entre Lagos. Eventually the bus came and 2 hours later we finally arrived. The town was even tinier than we expected but turned out to be great fun. Our cabin was down a gravel road right on the lake. The cabin itself was intended for 6 people and had two floors and great wooden ambiance. We cooked pasta and drank chilean wine, it was nice. Next day we took the same bus back toward the border to find some hotsprings and take a hike. We got great views of the surrounding mountains on the hike and then spent two hours or so soaking in this swimming pool style ¨hot springs¨ going back and forth from the freezing river to the hot pool. Relaxing. We´re currently in Pucón, Chile. It is the lowest of low season and it rained all day and it´s cold. There´s another amazing volcano very close to this town. So close in fact (and so recently active) that they have a stoplight-style warning system in town that goes from green to red depending on the volcano alert level. I was hoping for a good old eruption, but not this time. Hit some great hot springs today, much better than the last. The place was about 40 minutes into the mountains next to a big river. There were six natural stone pools each at a different temperature from 104-95 or so. The setting was beautiful and it was nice to be able to go from the really hot pools to the cooler ones. Killed a good three hours there in the rain. It´s forecast to rain for the next 10 days so it´s time to head north away from the impending winter. Bus to Santiago tomorrow at 10am. Bored yet?