If I had to guess what the most popular place in Patagonia is, I would say Bariloche, nestled in Argentina’s lake district. Gone are the sheer cliff faces, freezing temperatures, glaciers and windswept terrain of the far south. In their place are large expanses of forest, rolling mountains, sunny weather, and tranquil blue lakes everywhere! The most popular season is actually the winter, as it’s South America’s premier ski resort, but the summer weather was downright perfect when I got there, upper 70’s in the afternoon and almost no clouds. There are a plethora of activities to do around town: hiking, climbing, boating, kayaking, cycling, you name it.
It took a bit over 2 hours to arrive from El Bolson and the bus station is annoyingly far outside of town. There’s a bus that takes you into town, but you need a special card to use it, which I didn’t have, so I walked the 2+ miles into town with all my stuff, which is approaching my limit as to how far I’ll lug all my crap around in one trip! Both hostel and the city itself were very pleasant, well kept and kind of kitschy. The streets are lined with an insane amount of ice cream and chocolate shops, which is always a good thing! I made dinner in the hostel and met a couple Germans and a Dutch girl; it was very very nice to be able to speak English again and meet people to do stuff with!
The next day I met a girl from the Netherlands (ive met so many dutch people on this trip!) and we decided to do the Refugio Frey hike, which is just a little lodge up in the mountains. Me and Jet (pronounced Yet) took the easy way, which was a cable car followed by a chairlift to get us nice and high in the mountains. From there we’d only have a little bit of elevation gain to the top of the pass. From where we started my expert navigation brought us scrambling up a bunch of rocks, which we soon realized could not possibly be the real trail, but we kept going regardless and after a few spots with some easy rock climbing moves we eventually made it to the top of this mountain/rock pile and were rewarded with 360 degree views over the whole area! Sometimes the best places are not on the trail at all. Then we figured out where the trail actually was and headed down in that direction.
it’s good thing there is no photo of me attempting to get up onto this rock!
the pass
From there it took us three hours alpine hiking and scrambling with very nice views to reach Refugio Grey. It’s set in a valley with a small lagoon and surrounded by rocks walls on almost every side. Lots of people like to spend the night here to truly soak in the scenery, but I was getting a bit tired of camping, so a daytrip was plenty for me. We ate lunch at the lagoon, which is a very popular spot for young Argentines to hang out, and then hiked another couple of hours downhill back to where we started.
We rewarded ourselves nicely with ice cream and then later a nice steak dinner. We showed up to a highly recommended place at 10pm and the restaurant was still packed even then, it wasn’t until 11 that we actually sat down. Argentines eat much later than we do in the US! Jet and I ordered two steaks to share, one strip steak and one ribeye, both jugoso (juicy) aka medium rare, as well as three sides, which we didn’t realize were all mountains of food unto themselves! No way we were going to finish it all, but oh well. Both steaks were very tasty, but the ribeye was definitely my favorite with a bright red throughout and beautiful crust on the outside. It cost each of us a little more than $20 including a bottle of wine, very reasonable. It’s crazy how cheap wine is here, even at restaurants you can get a decent red for $6 or $7 a bottle! It’s good living in Argentina at the moment.
The next day I ended up renting a bicycle to do a popular 20-mile circuit that winds along a few lakes, up hills and through forests. It’s a got some nice lookouts plus a few cafes and breweries perfectly positioned to take advantage of the best views overlooking the lakes. It was windy, and bit more exhausting than I expected, but still a great way to spend an afternoon! And that was about it for Bariloche. I hung out with our small English speaking crew at the hostel that evening, left the next morning with a pit stop for one night in La Villa de Angostura (similar to Bariloche but smaller and more expensive) and then went back to the town Puerto Montt in Chile where I’d fly way up north to the Atacama desert.
But that trip to the Atacama desert did not happen! Yet !
Disclaimer: Long boring travel mishap ahead!
So as for Puerto Montt, I arrived there in the evening and would be flying out late the next evening up to the Northern Chile, the Atacama desert. Apparently I had missed out on some protests when I arrived because the streets were clear but I walked into some lingering tear gas. For whatever reason the locals seemed to walk through it okay, but I was all choked up and my eyes were welling up like crazy! I was literally crying ordering a footlong from Subway. After that I checked into my little family hostel and then had all day the next day to kill walking around the city and going to the mall etc. It wasn’t very exciting.
I pulled up ‘puerto montt airport’ on google maps and it looked like the airport is right outside of town, it’s a pretty small city, so that seemed about right. My flight was at 11:30pm, so I waited until about 10pm to catch a taxi. This was much much more difficult than I was expecting as it started to rain; there were some taxis around, but every single one was full! When I finally found one, he quoted me a price much higher than I was expecting. He showed me on the map where the airport was, and it wayyyy outside of town! Hmm. Ok, well its still fine, domestic flight, small airport, late at night, no traffic, all good. Driving along the road, this taxi is going much slower than everyone else and on the uphill part this thing was really struggling. He switched gears and the car just came sputtering to a halt. Noooo!
He tells me it’s fine, he knows what’s wrong, it’ll just be a couple of minutes, blah blah. He pops open the hood and starts jimmying around in there. He even has a bottle of water in the trunk to throw on it. Five minutes turn into ten, then fifteen. I’m getting extremely impatient, he’s getting frustrated, the stupid thing won’t start. He finally gets it going but now we are REALLY cutting it close. We get to the airport in 10 minutes and even if I was tempted to argue about the fare with the break down and all, there was no time! I jogged to the desk, and the lights are off, just one blue collar guy milling around in the background, who I flagged down. Aghh. I guess it closes 30 minutes prior to the flight and I got there a few minutes too late. Shiiiiiit. I already had my boarding pass, so I probably would have made it if I didn’t have to check a bag. Damn. Time for a new plan…
On the plus side, there is still one more flight to Santiago, so I’ll take that one, and then get to the Atacama desert from there! Oh wait, there’s no booking office inside the airport to buy a ticket. I’ll have to book it online with the airport wifi. The wifi is so slow and horrible, I’d get halfway through the process and it would time out. Thirty minutes of this and I was just about out of time. The super nice ladies behind the desk at Latam actually put me on the phone with the Latam office, but they had to put me on hold, and by the time I was off hold it was too late to book the flight. Thwarted again!
I went back online to see what else was available the next day. Everything is EXPENSIVE. Booking last second in South America is awful. I found a flight with SKY Airlines (expensive, but marginally better than my other options) to Uruguay (via Santiago) the next morning. That’s IF I can book it… After a few tries it finally went through, thank god. I had planned to go to Uruguay anyway for poker, so this works out fine as well. I’d do the Atacama later. At this point my best bet is to just sleep at the airport. I’ve got my camping stuff, sleeping pad, sleeping bag, inflatable pillow, so sure why not. And they have rows of chairs without armrests in between them, jackpot! I pick a row chairs, set up my camp, and get a few hours of sleep in.
I feel a little weird around 7am as people start to flow in and I’m spread out on my row of chair/campsite, but whatever, I’m comfortable, screw it. At 9am I’m finally able to check in, it only takes two minutes to get through security. It’s cloudy and drizzling outside. Around 10:15am the winds and rain really pick up, it’s not looking promising. Frigging Patagonia. At 10:30, when we are supposed to begin boarding there is announcement that the plane we were waiting on had aborted two attempts to land and had to be diverted to another airport. New departure time is delayed by eight hours! AGHGH!!
Well the first missed flight has just led to exponential problems! SKY Airlines won’t tell us anything about what they’re going to do about missed connecting flights, but hey we get a $10 food voucher! Can’t be used for alcohol though, ha. I met a German girl and Spanish guy in the same boat as me to wait it out with in the one and only (and very low quality) restaurant. Eventually I found out that I even though we’d fly to Santiago that night, but we couldn’t get to Montevideo until very late the following day. I ended up cancelling the Santiago to Montevideo flight for a full refund (it was way too pricey) and rebooking to Buenos Aires the next morning. What a clusterfuck. Rebooking to Buenos Aires did save me a good chunk of cash though.
So we finally took off 8pm and got to Santiago around 10pm. I ended up spending the night downtown Santiago, enough time to see how badly the riots had affected the city. It was bad, so many buildings boarded up, graffiti everywhere. But I didn’t have much time spend there, I just needed a good nights sleep and then it was back to the airport the next morning to fly to Buenos Aires. Which I did and it went smoothly! Thank god. Fun times in South America! Sooo uhh Buenos Aires is up next!