We have spent the last 10 days, including our trekking adventure, in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina. Bariloche for short. Bariloche is on the northern side of Patagonia and is written about as the Switzerland of Argentina.

The first 2 days were spent wandering around the city, taking a tour of the 7 lakes district entirely in Spanish and putting our plans together for the hike, not to mention staying in 3 different hostels. The next 3 days were spent on the trail, as mentioned in our previous post. The next three days we headed south for beautiful scenery, a famous handicraft market and a much smaller town.

El Bolson was living up to the hype when we arrived in the afternoon and we were off to find a hostel, wander the streets to take it all in, and scope out a place for dinner. We ended up going to a parrilla, which is Argentina’s version of a Steakhouse. Mike got the lamb and I had the beef ribs. Very good! The next morning it starting raining and we thought we could wait it out, but no go, so off to the craft fair in the rain. The stuff for sale was pretty neat ranging from jewelry, woodworking and pottery. This proved to be a great place to get a cheap lunch as well and we sampled a number of specialties from the various carts. I won’t get into details here, you’ll have to read the Food and Beverage Edition. The next day we made our way to yet another national park and Lago Puelo. Since there was so much rain the day before, a lot of the trails were closed and lots of the picnic areas were flooded.

We returned to Bariloche to more wind and cold summer weather. Even the lady working at the hostel said this was cold for summer and more like winter. We really only had 1 full day left so we went to see on of the top 10 best views in the world, as rated by National Geographic (or at least that’s what they were advertising). From the top of Cerro Campanario, we couldn’t exactly see what makes it famous due to the haze, and sideways rain but the 360 is quite impressive with lakes one way and snow capped mountains the other way. The afternoon was spent eating empanadas and picking out a couple of chocolates from “the best” chocolate shop in town. Remember this is Argentina’s Switzerland. We finished off of last day in
Bariloche doing a self-made micro-brew mini-pub crawl and enjoyed some music.

This morning the winds are moving us to Puerto Iguazu.

Tags: Argentina