More About Bariloche

Here's another picture of Lago Nahuel Huapi on the shores of Bariloche. We made it to El Bolson, a pueblo 70 miles south of Bariloche, on Tuesday. It's a small town located in a valley between two mountains, but there's no skiing so it has a completely different feel from Bariloche. I don't think I saw a building bigger than two stories. You've got locals, and a bunch of artisans who come to spend their summers there and sell their work to tourists. Tuesdays are street fair days, and folks sell their wares in stalls around the central plaza ... everything from leather belts to bone-handled knives to jewelry to waffles with fresh berries and cream to home made beer. Despite the fact that they are there because of tourists, many of the tourists are local Argentines who are spending part of their summer holidays in the mountains or have second homes there. El Bolson has a pretty authentic, sleepy, artsy, hippy-ish feel to it, not unlike Fairfax in Marin. We ate pretty much everything in sight ... Armenian empanadas (they were like spiced beef homentashin - check my spelling), to spinach, corn and cheese tarts to waffles with fresh raspberries, strawberries and cream. Rosana had never seen a waffle before. And you might ask what a waffle is doing in the middle of Patagonia. Again, the non-latin European part of Argentina. It's really a melting pot of people and cultures, though spanish and italian are by far the dominant two. We drove another ten miles to Lago Puelo, where we ate lunch by the lake and took a boat ride out on it for a better view of the mountains. There really wasn't much to Lago Puelo, so we headed back to our cabin in Bariloche and made plans to take a bus 3 hours north to San Martin de Los Andes on Wednesday. We hadn't planned to go there intially, but we had pretty much seen everything wanted to see near Bariloche and weren't ready to go back to Buenos Aires just yet. Unless you are going to spend a lot of time trekking trails in the mountains or camping - neither of which we were set up to do; I had a swiss army knife but that was about the extent of it and they heaviest action it saw was cutting smoked cheese, you can see most of the sights within driving distance of Bariloche in a few days. It turned out to be a good thing that we went to San Martin, because we had a good time and both ended up liking it better than Bariloche. The couple who rented us the cabin in Bariloche had lived for 5 years beforehand in San Martin and the way they described it, Bariloche is were Argentines go to ski (and non-Argentines go because they've heard about it), and San Martin is where Argentines go to get away to a tranquil mountain town (and few non-Argentines go). It's much smaller than Bariloche and situated on the shores of smaller lake. More about it tomorrow. Boca, Tigre and San Lorenzo all won today, so there's going to be a big 3 way play off next week for the championship.