El Bolson to Bariloche

We stayed in a campground in El Bolson that like many campgrounds had horses and farm animals to keep the grounds trimmed.  Included in the five dollar per person price was wifi, nice clean hot showers, a kitchen and best of all a free washing machine.  (the washing machines seem to take a long time here for some reason. This one took an hour and a half but did a good job) The owner was also in the middle of building a huge hundred foot high zip line.  They also have a open air bar at the campground. Try combining that with a hundred foot high zip line in the United States where you could potentially hit a horse on the other end.  Insurance companies would laugh at you for trying to buy that level of protection from the American legal profession.  Currently there are about twenty people here. The owner said that in high season a month ago there were more like two hundred. One dreadlock couple here, he from Germany and she from Valiparaso Chile are making healthy whole grain empanadas to sell at the market by just walking around main street with a sign. Laurie helped out and we had a quite a few. They sold for about a dollar each.

There are also lots of hawks in the campground that the chickens chase away. It is interesting the number of large wild birds around in Argentina. Although some of the signs have bullet holes you almost never hear the sound of guns being fired for target practice or enjoyment.  The number of raptors, condors and other large insect eating ground birds makes me think that they don’t get shot at as they would be easy target practice. I think most of those birds would have long gone the way of the buffalo in America. Guys with guns in the states just could not help themselves with such easy targets.

The timing happened to be good for us to catch the big market in El Bolson which was mostly jewellery and woodwork.  Intricate macrame jewellery is commonly for sale in Patagonia as a handicraft art form. There was some good looking produce and not all the vendors were hippies.  I later wondered how many of the vendors actually made their own work. Laurie said she ran into a woman on a ferry that got by selling jewellery she bought cheap in other South American countries. El Bolson other than market day is not so dominated by hippies and even on market day is like other medium sized towns in Argentina in that it has lots of loud cars and barking dogs.  Loud cars and hippies is not something I would normally put together so I doubt El Bolson will make it all that far as an international hippy retirement community.  The official theme of the town is something like “magically natural”.  At night around eight thirty it is like there is a magically natural volume knob on the town that gets turned up about thirty or forty percent with cars, barking dogs, chain saws etc. Laurie joked that now is the time if you have anything with an engine to fire it up! We have encountered that elsewhere where even middle aged middle class adults will talk and laugh much louder about that time. Sometimes the laugh and the volume sound a bit forced.  A fake laugh is discernible no matter what language you don’t understand.

Some of the hippies by the way were smoking pot in the plaza around the market but we seldom see anything like the class of drug users you see in the US on meth. I am sure you have seen the posters of the physical effects on users of that.  You seldom see people who look like that here. Laurie can pick them out from her experience at work. People in South America do abuse alcohol which in case you forgot from your high school health class has some pretty nasty side effects as well but, those thankfully are socially acceptable or even glorified.

The 125 kilometer ride from El Bolson to Bariloche was nice enough, being all paved and with about half of it in a National Park. I do have to complain though that Nahuel Huapi Natanal Park was a bit underdeveloped. There was no fee to enter but there also was no tourist information at any point in the park. Apparently there is an office in Bariloche if you are coming in from the north.  Usually in the case of the US I would be complaining that the parks are over developed and over regulated. This one is so under developed that there are little or no pull out parking for views, day use picnic areas and only one pay campground presumably run by the park that you don’t know about until you are right on it. At one point we saw about seven cars pulled off the road and wondered what was going on. Maybe there was a bear only they don’t have bears. Well it was some families who pulled over and walked up the side of a hill to have a picnic lunch. Not surprisingly all the wide spots in the road were pooh outs with invasive feces.  The park needed to be a little more pooh active.  The park backs wealthy enclaves of Bariloche on the north end so maybe the thinking is if you want to be by a lake with a mountain view then you should buy a place. It is like the Palm Springs area with hardly any public lap pools. If you want a lap pool then buy a house with one and stop complaining! The other problem is that the road through the park is Route 40 which is the main north south route in central Patagonia. That meant there were lots of trucks and an astounding number of big double decker tour buses in route to the other touristy areas further south even though the high season is over. We did manage to find a place to camp just inside the park that appeared to be an old overgrown access road for a ranch near a stream. It was gated but for a bike tourist that is not too big of an obstacle. Many bike tourists we talked to would balk at that and would never cross a fence or a gate but Laurie and I are usually not too worried about it and it has not been a problem so far. We are pretty low impact and do not leave trash so it is hard to get too worried about it with say cow pooh around in a pasture.

Bariloche is very well known around the world if not so much by Americans.  I got to talking with an interesting bike shop guy who said it is the most expensive city in South America.  Besides the huge natural lake with mountains all around it is also well known for its skiing. He said that the skiing is so expensive that most of the locals can’t afford it.  He threw out some number like the average family spent $2,500 to $5,000 a week on skiing which doesn’t sound that far off what a US ski vacation would cost only the average person probably makes quite a bit more. He also said that in high season that there are roughly sixty thousand tourists to the one hundred and sixty thousand residents. We came in from the south end of town that we had never seen before and there were pretty large slums there that looked like worse living conditions than most normal towns we have been in. It always seems like the more supper wealthy there are the more poverty there is. 

Bariloche besides the natural beauty has lots of chocolate shops, breweries, fondue restaurants and of course high end clothing stores. Some of the chocolate shops were huge being the size of say a whole foods store in Bend at maybe hundred by a 100 x 150 feet.  In general though it seems to have gone downhill since we were here last. It has more of a big city feel and they are not doing a very good job of controlling the graffiti most of which is not very artistic.  The La Bolsa hostel where we are staying has a lot of character with extensive rustic woodwork. Our private room with bathroom with the ten percent biker discount is only about thirty five dollars. The woman who owns it assured us that it would be quite. We brought our stuff into the room and no sooner did I lay down to relax a bit when someone upstairs started playing very intense complex drums.  Laurie went to ask the owner about it and she said it was her son but he only practiced for a half hour a day. Actually he was very good and was headed off in a couple of days to music school in Buenos Aires.  He had this forehead though that stuck out in front about an inch more than normal making him look like an alien from a Hollywood movie where they attach all that stuff on their face to mold it.

American beer enthusiast will be glad to know that happy hour here starts at seven thirty but a real beer enthusiast might be disappointed to know they don’t open until then either.  We went to a brew pub and had a sampler of about ten beers they made.  They were all excellent even better than Deschutes Brewery offerings including the porter.

It is raining here today so I am going to keep up the patter.  Last night Laurie got to talking to two American guys that were here with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). They had just evacuated out of Coyhaique in Chile where the civil unrest in the Aisen Provence is getting really bad. We luckily missed all that. We did wonder why there were all these army guys walking around Coyhaique though. Thousands of locals are blocking the Carratera Austral to protest high gas prices and the fact that they do not have a good hospital with a trauma center. We have seen a dozen cyclists that were headed that way.  The Americans said that they locals did not have any animosity toward tourists though. Their beef was with the government in Santiago.

The two NOLS guys had been on some serious adventures. They had spent a month on an ice field and another month in sea kayaks.  On the ice field they covered a hundred and sixty kilometres and at one point were pinned down for a week with bad weather. They said there were only a few ways up onto the ice field that did not include technical climbing on either ice or bad rock.
The sea kayak trip they did they carried thirty days of food.  At the beginning of the trip it took twelve people to carry a kayak into the water!  It rained for thirty days but being in a kayak is not a bad activity in the rain. They had tales of dolphins, whales, sea lions and bio luminescent water. They also had tales of extensive salmon farms where in order to feed them they dredge the bottom of the ocean and then take everything and make it into pellets. Most of that gets shipped to the US but only before they die it pink because before that it is a sick white color.  How is that for cheerful environmental news?
At first I was jealous but then got to thinking about the kind of weather they had to deal with.  For a commercially guided sea kayak  trip we have been hearing prices in the neighbourhood of several thousand dollars per person a week. There is that kind of gear to buy hear but the NOLS  guys said you have to have it all checked out with the Chilean navy plus carry a uhf radio where you check in with them every day. That does not sound too impossible but it would take a serious commitment.
The NOLS guys also mentioned a famous granite climbing area that is a four hour hike in from the ski area that we are now thinking we should do. Even though I don’t climb much I like to visit climbing areas to experience the rock at a lower level.

By the way the LDS has a big sterile looking church here and rumor has it they are advancing through the region.  Forget about communism do not let Mit Romney get elected or they will be poised to take over the world!

Other than that we are hearing good things about the tour up to San Martin de los Andes so that is looking like the next leg rather than heading over to Buenos Aires from Bariloche to then do the coast of Uruguay which we also have heard good things about. Who knows if that will happen?

Here are some pictures from El Bolson to Bariloche.

Cholila to El Bolson all is well

After the very pleasant afternoon ride out of Cholila the next town of any size is Epuyen. We try not to be focused on towns as goals as we would rather primitive camp but it takes a bit of effort not to think that way when you are looking at a map and planning your route. In this case Epuyen was in a valley that as we rode up to it I thought it looked like someplace I would like to spend some time. We could have ridden more but now without having to any goals to check off like making it to the far south before it got too cold or trying to somewhat gauge our progress against other riders on the Carratara Austral, we are enjoying the freedom really leisurely touring. When you are heading south and the weather keeps getting colder and colder you become unconsciously uneasy about your mission. Now that we moved north about a season warmer and are continuing to head in this direction we are more comfortable with the mission whatever that is.

Anyway even though we could have pressed on we were looking down the valley into Epuyen that we knew nothing about previously and decided we wanted to go down to the lake to camp. The town and lake are a bit off the road so there is a little commitment. At the tourist information kiosk on the highway we heard some puppies crying and decided to see what their situation was. They were crossing the highway and were very frightened especially one yellow lab mix one that was shaking with anxiety.  We got them some water that they drank a lot of and tried to calm them down by petting them which helped a bit. We decided to take them into town and at least get them off the highway. Once into town we got them some food and after more petting they calmed down quite a bit. Being on our bikes we could not really help them much more but took them over to a school yard with some bones in hopes that someone would fall for them. They maybe had a lesson that some people can be a source of support and to seek them out.

From there we headed down to the lake and ended up in a camping place owned by a couple in their sixties from France who had lived in Argentina for most of their adult lives. They had spent many years as ski instructors in Bariloche.  On their farm by the lake they had apple, peach and walnut trees all of which happened to be in season.

The seasons here in Patagonia are quite a bit off what they are in the US. In the US peaches and blackberries are a mid-summer crop, at least they are in Hood River. It is now what would be about the middle of September in the US.  People still have lots of flowers blooming in there yards like roses and irises even.  The walnuts on the farm here were so good they almost tasted like pecans.  The owners did not have any problem with us helping ourselves to the peaches and apples. They had camping and a room inside the main house but we opted for the room off the barn where you had to supply your own sleeping bag and we could store our bikes. They had a new little puppy that was being raised as a country dog in the barn but the puppy decided it really liked the curling up to people in down sleeping bags. It went in and out of the barn at will but cried to get back up on the bed. In the morning we went for a canoe ride on the lake before leaving.

One thing you get used to here is that pretty much anything goes. If you want to rent out a room in a barn well that is your business. Houses are clearly not built by licensed tradesman of any sort.  If there is a light bulb socket right over the shower head you shower at your own risk. If the toilet is not attached to the floor then you just can’t lean over very far. If there is a wall heater that faces a cabinet in a corner that gets real hot then you probably better not hang clothes in front of it. I read where recently in my home town they were going to pass a law that food carts had to have a certain number of parking spaces and some sort of sewer drain. That seems laughably absurd compared to here where if you wanted to start a chainsaw store that sold hard liquor and toys next to a campground well you never know what might feed a family so go for it.

The road out of Epuyen was on route 40 which is the main north south road on the east side of the Andes. The traffic was a bit heavier than the day before. Laurie, after having been hit by a car two day ago was sticking to the side of the road like glue. We both much prefer touring without much traffic no matter what the scenery looks like. We followed the populated mountain valley into the next town of El Hoyo and decided to take a detour into Lago Puelo National Park on the way to El Bolson.  Lago Puelo has a view of Tres Picos that we admired from the south in Cholila. The town of La Puelo is very touristic with about a mile long strip of dining and logging right up to the border of the park. We decided to forgo that and hopefully camp inside the park. The camp inside the park after a short kilometre or two ride was disappointing in that it was huge and had no view of the lake or mountains.  We walked along the shore with all the no camping signs until we got to the river delta where the sign said there was no more law enforcement so we forded the shallow fork in the river and camped as stealthily as we could in the willows of the delta. We were glad to take the risk to have a view of the lake and Tres Picos that evening and the next morning. Luckily the weather was clear so camping without propping up the tent and hiding behind some driftwood worked out ok.

The next morning we had a nice short low traffic ride on pavement into El Bolson. We passed one dapper old guy dressed in sort of cowboy clothes and a neatly trimmed moustache several times as he stopped to tinker with his ancient Renault to keep it going.

Here are more pictures with captions