Day 14
We woke in our hostel early and had some breakfast. The only double room the hostel had available was a room with bunk beds. Ellen got top bunk. So much room for activities! I was feeling a bit ambitious on this particular morning and put this weird yogurt/milk that smelt strongly of strawberries on my cereal. We have been seeing it everywhere since we arrived in South America. DO NOT EAT IT. It is the sweetest thing I have ever tasted, and I have a sweet tooth. I’ll inhale sugar for breakfast, lunch & dinner but this stuff was not good. Next time I see this poison at a breakfast I’m pouring it down the sink.
Our plan for the day was to catch a bus out to one of the many trails in Barlioche and go for a big hike. We were on a mission – we zipped down to the information centre at 9am to find out what bus we should catch & what trails are the best to do including their approximate durations. We headed back to the hostel to pack & Ellen asked the hostel staff where we catch the buses from. Ellen got some great news – the buses are on strike for the day! Not just a few hours, not just a few routes, the whole bus network of Barlioche was on strike for the whole day! We laughed at the timing of it, of course they had a strike when we are here!
We were a little bit like hmmmmm what should we do now. Ellen came up with the magnificent Plan B – hire a car for the day! We wandered around the streets, found a car hire place and we were in a car in less than an hour. Success! Off we went with not much of an idea where we were going. The road rules here are a bit different. There are intersections where cars just drive. No give way/stop signs/traffic lights/roundabouts for a 4 way intersection. It is first in best dressed! And I thought Melbourne’s “Right hand turn from the left lane” rule was bad. Not sure how more people don’t have accidents, but the “just drive” methodology seems to work. We headed just south of Barlioche and found a random beautiful lake sitting under some humongous cliffs. We pulled over and hung out here for a while. No one around – I think this type of scenery is standard in this area. But for 2 Aussies from flat country Australia this was… much better than that strawberry yogurt of death I had for breakfast.
From here we headed to the west of Barlioche into the middle of the ‘Nahuel Huapi National Park’. Ellen’s google maps took us through some random shanty towns with very dodgy dirt roads – some big Argentinian men on some work sites were looking at us a bit funny probably thinking “bloody tourists”. We successfully found ourselves back on the main road which was mostly unpaved. The scenery was beautiful. We cruised through a ring road which took us through the national park for a few hours stopping at amazing viewpoints of massive mountain formations over clear fresh water lakes. We did a 1 hour hike up to Cerro Llao Llao (Cerro means hill) which was nice and had awesome views of the big mountains and lakes.
From here we headed to a little town in the middle of the National Park called Colonia Suiza. It has no paved roads and just a bunch of little shops/restaurants and bars. I think this place would be packed on a Saturday night especially if the buses were running! We had some hotdogs (The Completo) for dinner! Yummo. We are very confused with the currency here at the moment. An Aussie dollar gets us 26.7 Argentinian pesos. A flash looking $100 note is worth just under $4 AUD. It is a bit tricky to calculate!
A bit tired from all the driving & scenery looking we went back to the hostel, watched the sunset from the deck which has an amazing view of the Nahuel Huapi Lake which Barlioche sits on and drank some $3 AUD wine. Yes – we are starting to go a bit more up market with our Vino!
It was definitely worth hiring the car for a day to get a good look at all of Barlioche’s surroundings!
Day 15
Rest day!
We just walked around the town of Barlioche peering into their many chocolate shops. We caved eventually bought some chocolates, they are so delicious! Barlioche is known as the Chocolate capital of Argentina. Which shows, there are 15 or so different chocolate shops along the main street of Barlioche.
We found out a bit of history of Barlioche. The city was redesigned in the 1930s to have the appearance of a Eurpoean central alpine town and was known as “little Switzerland”. Many of the buildings were made of wood and stone. Some photos below of the buildings. Post this redevelopment – tourism of the town took off and is now a huge ski resort town in the winter.
A lot of Nazi’s have been known to have hidden here after the war as there is a lot of German heritage in this area as well as just across the border in Puerto Varas/Montt. Not a bad place to hide!!!
Ellen told me she just read this post on facebook on how to get the perfect candid shot. Just before the photo is taken, do a cough and your smile will be perfect. We both did this. Results are below – I think she is right! I reckon Ellen has known this for a while which is why she looks so good in all her photos.
Run, nap, read for the afternoon.
For dinner we went to a burger & beer bar called Belek. 100% recommend. This is a big call, but it was the best beef burger I have ever had. I almost started crying it was so good. They do something amazing with their meat here the Argentinians! Also during happy hour 2 pints cost $5.50 AUD. So good!
Happy and fed we hit the hay for the night.
Day 16
We awoke early and headed straight out the door to do the Refugio Frey day hike – it is an out and back approx. 20km hike. The temperature was due to hit around 30 degrees later in the day so we wanted to get up the top before midday!
Ellen used her poles for the first time – looking very pro! I also utilised my fantastic pants that have zippers to convert them to shorts. I feel like I’m getting so old!
The scenery on the hike was changing the whole way up. The first hour or so was dusty & dry but offered awesome views of the lake which we drove around a couple of days ago. Then the trail headed into a rainforest sort of area with a lot of huge trees, creeks & flowers. Another hour or so we were out of the rainforest and we were smacked with cool views of large jagged rock mountains. We arrived at the top in just around 3 hours with 880m of elevation gain.
At the Refugio Frey hut there were loads of people camping and also lot of rock climbers. We got chatting to a German guy and he said the climbing is amazing here and lots of it. Looking around we just thought they look like a bunch of rocks. But I guess a bunch of rocks is a climbers paradise!
I was trying to take a selfie with my phone, I dropped it. It fell a good 3m and fell into a creek and got washed down a mini waterfall. It still kind of works but the screen is buggered! I guess that will teach me for trying to take a selfie without a selfie stick.
After an hour or so we headed back down the same way. We passed a lot of hikers heading up. We beat the rush! We arrived at the bottom wondering when the next bus into town would arrive as they only arrive every hour. We timed the bus almost perfectly and basically didn’t need to break stride! This made up for the phone incident.
Bit tired and sore, we had a rest in the Hostel for an hour or so then headed out to find some more delicious burgers. This time we went to a place called Munush after hearing some raving reviews about it. Hot tip, if a place looks a bit fancier, and is a bit more expensive it means it has bad burgers. Just joking, it was still the second best burger I have had in my life but it was not as good as Belek!
For the rest of the night we went back to the hostel, packed up for our 5am wake up for the bus down to El Chalten the following day! Weooooow
Day 17
5am wake up to catch our 25 hour bus to El Chalten. We could have flown but the prices for flights this time of year are ridiculous and we thought it would be a good way to see the scenery of Argentina!
We successfully got a cab from our hostel to the bus terminal by showing the nice cab man on the map where we want to go. We really, really need to work more on our Spanish!
The bus route from Barlioche to El Chalten follows the Andes part of the way & then heads more inland to the centre of Argentina. We saw some amazing scenery of the snow capped mountains of the Andes, to the vast expanses of land which reminded me of the Urana plains, only this area was full of rocks so no good for cropping! We also came across a huge lake which could be easily mistaken for an ocean. We think due to the wind, there were waves around 2-3 foot crashing on the beach. No one was surfing though.
No Sudoku for me to keep myself entertained as my phone is busted. So I had to resort to staring out the window and watch the movie La La Land and Lion twice. Ellen was listening to her book, snoozing, eating chips & teaching us all about fashion. Photo below. Just the usual for Elle.
Can’t wait to get to El Chalten! More photos located here.
Justin & Ellen's travels 