Understanding the ´Bar´ in Bariloche
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2006
1
8
60
Trip End
Aug 04, 2007
Bariloche,
Argentina
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
The initial complete overexcitement of being on a boat for four days didn´t wear off straight away - in fact it took until half way through day two, when the boat went into the Golfo de Penas and the open Pacific and it was rather bumpy; and the wine wasn´t going down to well; and the stench of cowshit from the several trucks containing said animals on the lower open decks just a door and a couple of flights down from our cabin wasn´t assisting the wellness of many a stomach; and it was pissing down with rain so you couldn´t see anything, for me to lose my childish excitement about having bunkbeds with curtains and a porthole and some Swiss roommates one of whom was a shepherd!
Navimag is a commercial shipping company that has got wise to the tourist desire not to travel the long and interminably boring route north from Puerto Natales to Bariloche by road and to have a little nautical adventure instead and so has created some perfectly comfortable cabins on one of its ships - the Magallenes - to take 350 passengers on its weekly journeys from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt. As such whilst most of the passengers are Gringos, this is most definitely not a cruise, evidenced by the cows, the banging trucks and the school dinner food. That said the crew were just lovely and did a sterling job of providing entertainment in the form of interesting talks about glaciers (I´m so in love with glaciers), penguins (I´m not in love with Penguins) and life in the only inhabited place along the entire route (Puerto Edén); putting on movies (it was very apt watching Motorcycle Diaries); and creating what we´ve dubbed ´Gringo Bingo´, a winner-takes-all last night social extravaganza that for the German guy who won every prize possible was the highlight of the trip.
I´ve discovered that not only does Ben hate flying, he´s also not that keen on boats and so to counteract his angst he has to stay up past everyone else and neck a bottle of wine to ensure some kind of sleep. Even then, he spent the whole night we were sailing through the Golfo de Penas, looking out of the porthole and the 5 metre high waves and staying awake, just to check, despite the horrendous banging and rolling, that we were still above the waves, and formulating our escape plan should we suddenly be under the water.
I did feel a little duped as I´d envisaged us floating past icebergs and heaps of gorgeous glaciers and wildlife streaming into the sea, but obviously that´s in the winter and we´re in summer so it was green (and rainy) and we missed all the dolphins - everyone else saw them bar us: and the much promised Blue Whales when we got into the Pacific were also difficult to see as it was dark! That said we were genuinely hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest civilisation and between us and that lay the marginally inhospitable Southern Patagonian Ice Cap, which nobody ever goes to and in some respects is more inaccessible than Antarctica (not least because it´s part of the Parque Nacional Bernardo O´Higgins which nobody´s allowed into...).
Downsides were the 12 hours on the Golfo de Penas and the open Pacific (thank god Ben got me a sea sickness tablet!) and the rain which kept us inside. Upsides were the lovely people we met (Retired Swiss Solar Eclipse Chasers - next one in China in 2009; a Geordie/Irish couple; a Northern Irish/Oz couple, an American family with Grandpa who talked about the ´john´ a lot; meeting up with Bill the Californian again, and of course the Shepherd), and shared much red wine with, the endless card games in which I routinely whipped Ben; the chance to sit and think and do nothing; the tiny channels that it didn´t seem possible that the boat would fit through; and the lush green islets dotted around (like hippos according to Ben); the picture perfect shipwreck; and sitting on deck, when it wasn´t raining and you were upwind from the cows was so beautifully peaceful that you could just watch the world and think. Truly fabulous.
We arrived in Puerto Montt in Chile on the morning of the 18th and we´d decided we´d make a side trip to the little island of Chiloé which kind of hangs off the bottom of Chile before the latter turns to go down to the tip of the continent. Chilote life evolved separately from Chile so it has some distinct characteristics that make it a charming place to go, the only downside being (as we heard one Puerto Monttian woman say) "It almost always rains in Chiloé." But we thought being Brits we could cope with that. We headed for the capital Castro and had a lovely couple of days. We wandered around Castro in the afternoon of the 18th and saw the Palafitos (houses on stilts that have one entrance on the street and one on the water) and the gorgeous Jesuit church. All the churches on Chiloé (some 300 of them) are made of wood. Having pretty much exhausted the sites quite quickly we spent a couple of hours debating the merits of married life in a bar (with a boat for a bar) and then headed back to our room with a view to catch up on some much needed sleep - the bunkbeds on the boat not being so great after all ... despite the curtain.
In my rubbish, but improving Spanish I managed to understand from the lady of the house we were staying in that there was a concert on at the gorgeous church that evening that we might want to go to, so we did. I turned out to be a very impressive concert by a local youth orchestra so we really got into the Christmas mood with beautiful renditions of pieces by Mozart, Haydn, Vivaldi and more. Half way into the third hour of beautiful music it had lost some of its charms, not least because I almost got into a row with someone's dad after telling his daughter off in my poshest English voice for continually kicking my seat. Oh so English! It was a lovely way to spend the evening and for some reason made me glad not to be in England doing standard Christmas Party, spending too much money, stressing to finish all the work before the holidays stuff... can´t think why ...
After "una noche en blanco" ("sleepless night" thanks to Ben´s aural hallucinations of Dido music) we got up at the crack of dawn to visit a smaller island called Quinchao and had a gorgeous morning seeing beautiful shingled houses, perfect little town squares, misty views of the patchwork rolling hills of Chiloé, lovely little harbours (really reminded me of Devon) and soaking up a day when it hardly rained at all. We headed back to Castro for a lunch of Curanto (a stew of shellfish, meat and dumplings - yum) before getting the bus back to Puerto Montt and staying in a creepy place that was like something out of The Shining.
The following day we escaped Johnny and his mother and caught a bus that was going to take us on a journey through the Andes to Bariloche, back in Argentina. We´d decided to opt for the expensive option and go on a bus and boat extravaganza that takes you to some lakes and across some land you can´t otherwise see. And neither did we. It would have been spectacularly gorgeous; views of the perfectly conical Volcano Osorno, other densely forested extinct volcanoes and mountains falling straight into emerald green waters and beautiful waterfalls and then temperate rainforest travelled through on a ricket 1950´s bus. However, as it was absolutely chucking it down we could pretty much see the end of our noses and that was about it; and for some reason, whilst we braved the rain to stand outside the boat and try and experience something of the the famous fabulous Lake District, our fellow passengers (mostly in their fifties - the trip being slightly outside the standard backpacker budget) could have been on the channel ferry for all the attention they paid to their surroundings.
So our arrival in Bariloche (in the northern most part of Patagonia, in the beautiful Lake District (can´t speak for the one in England, as haven´t been there but it has to be pretty damn special to top this one)) - heralded by several people I know as a fantastic place - was a bit of a damp squib and not helped by the fact that Ben then had to spend 2 hours schlepping the streets in a torrential downpour looking for a room as I caught up with Owen Meany (more of him later) in a cosy hostel that didn´t want us. But no matter, my lovely husband found us a bed for the night and we looked forward to a clearer day tomorrow and our trek into the Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi to see some black lakes, more glaciers (see told you I was obsessed) and views over the many lakes of the district. Alas, downer number 2 - due to the (apparently unseasonal yet still hideous) rain and the ridiculous 100kph wind, the trails in the park were closed and the rangers weren´t letting anyone in. Oh, well, that´s nothing a spot of Christmas shopping and planning a new adventure for tomorrow can´t fix.
Our Plan B was to hire a car and drive the Ruta de Siete Lagos (7 lakes road) which takes you through some stunning scenery to a town called San Martín de los Andes (Ben kills himself laughing every time he sees this and says - "They´re up his sleevies" ... he´s 33 going on 10!) 180km north of Bariloche. It was absolutely stunning (for description see boat ride above) ... and it would have been more so if we could see through the torrential rain that our poor little Biscuit Tin (the car was smaller than a Fiat Cinquecento and we christened it Maggie as everything else around here is named after Magallenes and as everyone knows cars are girls ....) was frantically wiping off its windscreen and having to cope with the off road mud ... joy. Surely this was more Lake District, Cumbria than Argentina?? After a brief petrol stop in SM de los Andes (sleevies) we turned the wincing Maggie around and headed back to Bariloche. We decided to go back via a different route as we were concerned about her ability to cope with more mud. Instead we were subjected to 4 hours of back shattering bumps on a rutted gravel road and a near fatal (for Maggie not us - we were only doing 25 mph the whole way) encounter with some sand. We did however experience the breathtaking Enchanted Valley with not a soul around. This is a steep valley which is home to the most wierd and wonderful (and phallic) rock formations and was completely entrancing - well for Ben, I was too busy concentrating on the potholes all the way as he´s conveniently left his glasses in the UK and so can´t drive!
We eventually got back to the hostel and crashed. So far Bariloche wasn´t endearing itself to us and the next day didn´t improve things as the National Park was still closed and we decided to view the area from the top of Cerro Catedral; a huge mountain that forms the premier ski area in Argentina just 20 km from Bariloche. I´ve never seen a ski resort out of season and I wouldn´t recommend it. The terrain is completely destroyed by the skiing and in Bariloche the mountains are inhabited by strange tribes of identically dressed Argentinan teenagers who go up the chair lifts to play in a scrap of snow as part of a week long coming of age piss-up that Bariloche is the mecca for. Most bizarre. To lift our somewhat dampened spirits (we had also yet to meet any spirits of the kindred variety either) and get us in the Christmas mood Ben created his unique answer to the problem - "Ben´s Bariloche Bender". He quizzed a number of people in the hostel (by now we´d moved back into our preferred Hostel 1004, had our own room and stunning 10th storey views over the lake) about good bar´s in town (it´s known throughout Argentina for its nightlife) and created a pub crawl for us of no less than 11 bars. Suffice to say we saw every inch of Bar - iloche and made our mark. This included a long conversation with a German Brewer (about the Kölsch (Collins!) we were drinking) in bar number 3; two songs dedicated to Ben by the singer of the house band who spent the first 10 years of his life in Highbury and met Ben in the loos of bar 6 along with the nutty German girls who worked for the ministry of aviation (whatever that is); an argument about Ben not wishing to do the "crab dance" (Mr Hill) in the street on the way to bar 7; meeting some lovely people from our hostel at Wilkenny (bar 11) who laughed long and hard at me the next day; dancing like lunatics to Sweet Child o´ Mine just to show the static, posing Argentinians how a lady should dance, at our final port of call number 12 "Roxy"; and me falling asleep in the lift in the 3 minutes it took to reach our 10th floor hostel.
Well there´s not much I can say about Christmas Eve as I´ve never had such a bad hangover in my life (truly) and couldn´t drag myself out of bed until 7pm as the Christmas Party was about to start and I was determined not to miss it. Ben was very sweet all day although couldn´t really keep a straight face. Argentinians (like most of Europe except us and Holland) celebrate Christmas on its eve rather than the day, and each person was expected to create some dish to contribute to the feast. We´d missed this requirement in translation but fortunately Ben had a bottle of champagne for each table stashed away and we´d entertained our Swiss hostel-mates so much the night before that they took pity on us and give us some Alpmackerone (no idea how it´s spelt but it´s a carb and lard fest served with apple sauce ...) very nice it was too, followed by Toblerone Mousse and some true French crepes, the recipe for which our french ami David had phoned his mum in Paris especially for. Despite all our concerns it was an ace evening. We managed to have a truly Interntional Christmas. Ben and David had a beard-off; we met a truly lovely American medic; a Swedish girl with whom I discussed existentialism (it´s true!); a completely plastered Belgian girl who desperately wanted Ben to dance with her and had all the Swiss (there were loads of them) in fits of incredulous laughter at her indignant assertions that Yes, the Belgians do indeed make chocolate; several proposals of marriage to me by a very sweet 23 year old Dutch guy who insisted that everywhere we were going (he´d already been there but wanted to come to Africa with us again) was "Beaoooootiful" and managed to live up to every Dutch stereotype of being only interested in "to Party" and ditching me, when I insisted that bigamy wasn´t my style, to pull previously mentioned Belgian girl whose Flemish he described as sooooo sexy .... mmmmm?!?
So all in a wonderful Christmas Eve was had and Christmas Day was pretty wonderful too. After exchanging our pretty nifty gifts, we phoned home, got emotional (well I did) and then headed off to hire some bikes and cycle around some more lakes as the sun had finally decided to shine (but now being a public holiday the parks were closed!). It was glorious to be warm and cycling up steep hills being rewarded with fabulous view and then flying all the way down the other side - more moments of serene happiness. Christmas lunch consisted of stale bread, philadelphia and ham, washed down with warm water on top of a hill overlooking the most spectacular view with another Dutch guy called Eric we´d met during "Ben´s Bariloche Bender". Perfect. When we dropped off our bikes we had a couple of beers with Eric in some hammocks and then made our way back to town. To a supper of fajitas and enchiladas (unconventional but tasty nonetheless) and a full, happy, early crash to sleep off the previous 2 nights excesses.
Boxing Day the weather was awful again and the parks still closed, but we decided that we´d had a great time in Bariloche and we´d seen enough of the lakes on our 2 feet and 2 and 4 wheels to feel we could leave, so cut our losses and headed to Mendoza - the heart of the Argentinian wine region. And that is where I´ll stop for now or you´ll be reading this all day, but be prepared for another entry and all the pics very soon.
