Bariloche, Day #3
Day 3, our flight is very early at 07:50, the taxi is late, but we seem to be able to make it in time to the airport.
The flight is short and sweet (approx 2 hours) and we land in Bariloche. The place looks very similar (in scenery & temperature) to Sakhalin. Beautiful mountains, clear sky, nice chilly wind, perfect! We take a taxi to the Hotel (Sofia) and it looks nice as a start, I’ve booked a big room there, but we are not allowed to check in until 16:00 so we decide to dump the bags and hit the road!
Walking around the city, it is 100% authentic Swiss Sky Resort. The buildings, the clothing, the people, we don´t have the feeling we are in Argentina! The City hall/tourist bureau is inside a nice wooden style building that doesn’t seem out of place with the nice scenery. Once inside we see a lot of information about touristy stuff in Spanish which doesn’t do me any good… Jacques is able to read it though, which saves the day. We talk to one of the tourist agency ´little´ helpers (most probably stolen van Santa, and she doesn’t like it!)
We get a map and a couple of buses we can take to have a nice look around.
The first challenge was to find the right bus stop for the right destination (nearly all the buses are labeled 20,50,60 with all different directions. So after approx 1 hour we find the right stop… approx 45 minutes later the bus arrives! (Yay!) After a nice bus ride, we end up in the ski resort… then we start to think why we wanted to go here in the first place. Then we read the map from the agency to find out we were waiting at the wrong stop and ended up on the wrong destination (you would expect that with all the time waiting we would have read the map… well… we didn’t…)
So we want to walk to the actual location we wanted to go, it should only be about 5-10 km so walk-able. However after 1 km we see a nice sign that we both don´t understand (although I guessed it meant Dangerous risk of falling rocks) after talking to a bus driver it seemed I was right and the bus driver said that we should not take that route…
Walking back we see another bus 50 passing by so we decide to get on it, to go back to the City. There we wait for another 50 to get us to the actual destination we wanted to go (took us 2 hours additional).
Finally we are where we wanted to go! Excellent view of the lake, a waterfall and a nice hike to a view of the valley and the mountains! We take the bus back and decide to go to a nice steak house, where we have our introduction to the real ™ Argentina steak (I end up with 500gram of pure beef on my plate) and I can say, it is VERY tasty! My apologies for the vegetarians reading this, but I can say that this text was written Bit friendly and didn’t involve any harm to the
animal. Once back, we check in, get a wrong room, argue with the reception, get a new room… Once in the room, we find out that one of the water-pipes is running directly next to it and it causes to make a horrible noise once anybody in the building is using water… Using the toilet makes it feel like a UFO is landing next to your bed.. And I can tell you stories about the dreams I had that night involving ….probes. I wake up a few times and decide to harass the reception and they tell me they will to something about it.
I really hope they do otherwise I have to call the Men in Black.