Our New Best Friends in South America
Upon arrival in Bariloche, we were picked up by our new best friends in South America, Gustavo and his girlfriend Guadalupe.
Before leaving the US, I´d posted on my java.net blog about our trip, on the off chance that any NetBeans user out there would put us up or show us around. Well, these folks are independent software consultants who use the NetBeans platform in the course of their work. In fact, they specifically use some of the code I contributed to the project. So, they took two virtual strangers into their home for a week!
First, a word about Bariloche. It´s beautiful. Picture this: they took Lake Tahoe and moved it within 10 miles of Yosemite National Park. Then they got rid of 90% of the people, and dropped the real estate prices about 90%. That´s Bariloche. Patty and I had several sad discussions of all the practical reasons we shoudn´t move there. We felt it was, by far, the nicest, friendliest, most scenic part of Argentina.
We spent the first couple of nights with our hosts, learning all about each other, and correcting each others´ Spanish/English :)
Unfortunately, we arrived on a Monday. This means nothing to unemployed persons like ourselves, but our hosts had to work. We spent Tuesday wandering around the touristy city center, going to the excellent museum, walking the lakefront, and getting information about trekking in the park. The next day, we left our hosts to their work and took a bus into Nahuel Huapi National Park, specifically to Pampa Linda, a base camp for trekking up to Cerro Tronador, an extinct volcano covered year-round by Castaño Overa Glacier.
That evening, I was sitting atop one of the lesser peaks, overlooking the glacier. We´d completed a 1000 meter ascent from Pampa Linda, the last 300 or so being a scamble over volcanic rock alongside glacial ice, and barren otherwise. At the top ... Refugio Otto Meiling.
Refugios are just small cabins on mountain tops throughout Argentina and Chile. This one was quite different. It´s two stories, with ful itchen and a staff cooking dinner. I have no idea how they got the commercial-sized oven range up here! After our 6 hour trek, we were happy to pay for their hot meals and select from their extensive wine list!
We met some interesting folks in the refugio, including Michael, a German trekker who´d been attempting to reach the peak of Tronador solo for 3 weeks, and Helena, a biologist/mountain bike instructor from New Zealand who´d actually biked up from Pampa Linda (which impressed even the mountain guide who lived there).
The next day, we spent the morning exploring the glacier with Helena and a few others. The army had been up there a few days previously doing antarctic training (we´d crossed paths with them on the way up). They left their igloos on the glacier, and we had some fun playing in and around them.
Afterwards, we headed back down to Pampa Linda. That night, we stayed at our most expensive accomodation to date. It´s a simple but very comfortable hotel in Pampa Linda. The price included dinner consisting of the local trout, soup, salad, dessert and breakfast the next day. It was still less than US$100 for both of us.
On Friday, we headed back to Bariloche, to meet up with Gustavo and Guadalupe for the weekend. We wanted the authentic Argentinean experience, so they took us to their lovely hometown of El Bolsón, where we met several of Gustavo´s siblings and explored some of the smaller lakes and scenic overlooks. We ate at their favorite local restaurant, which had freshly-made ice cream, flavored with local fruits that we´d never heard of.
We also managed to introduce them to some American pasttimes, having with us a frisbee which they´d amazingly never seen outside of movies, and my REI sport kite, which was a particular hit on the windy lakeside beach at sunset Sunday night.
We were sorry to leave them, and blown away by their generosity. They were wonderful hosts in Bariloche, and went well beyond good hospitality in offering us the use of their vacant apartment in Buenos Aires, which is where we´re staying now.
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