A lot has happened since our last post, but the updates will be piecemeal.
We now find ourselves in the northwest of Argentina, in the city of Coronel Moldes, about 60km south of Salta. We are staying at an estancia (also known as a finca), which is essentially a ranch with horses. They are popular around here and typically involve living at the ranch and riding horses. The estancia that we´re staying at, called Santa Anita, has horses as the rest of them, which we rode earlier today to the nearby lake. However, their other claim to fame is their Slow Food award-winning goat cheese made from their own goats. We have tasted this cheese and can vouch for its deliciousness. Having said that, Argentina is not known for its quality of cheese, unfortunately. Somehow, they´ve not come up with good dairy products despite having a very well-developed cattle and sheep population. It´s just not apparent to them. The horseback riding was beautiful, and despite the fact that some of our party including myself were rather apprehensive about riding a horse, they were so tame and malleable that no trouble arose. We were led on our 2-hour ride by a 17-year-old gaucho. He was an interesting guy. In addition to learning to ride a horse at the tender age of 4, he also races horses (he owns one) and has been doing rodeo for 2 years. We figured that our gentle ride was rather boring for him. Tomorrow, we are leaving the estancia, returning to Salta, and then flying back to Buenos Aires in the evening.
However, now that we´ve provided an update on the most current events, let´s rewind back to where we last left off.
On our last night in Bariloche, we went to a restaurant outside of the touristy strip of town, La Fonda del Tio, which was recommended to us by an Argentine on our trip to Mount Tronador. It was completely non-touristy and absolutely full of locals. Besides the fact that it was full for the whole night throughout the time we left at around 11, the food was cheap and good. The saving grace was that all dishes were also available in half portions, and we´ve learned by now that Argentine portions are much larger than we are able to ingest in one sitting. We had a nice bife de chorizo and a milanesa steak (covered in a thick layer of cheese). On the way back from the restaurant, we came to the conclusion that the food is delicious and great in Argentina because it is of good quality products and similar in a lot of ways to the food that we eat and is cheap. The confluence of these factors makes it so great. What kind of a generic family restaurant in the States would serve nice cuts of beef for about $5?
The next day we did in fact go to Llao Llao, which was pretty but could have been avoided. We caught the bus north to San Martin de los Andes, a resort-type town about 200km from Bariloche on another lake. Unfortunately, the bus that we took did not take the most scenic route along 7 lakes, but we saw some other lakes and some desert. In light of soreness in the legs from our conquering of Cerro Catedral in Bariloche, we decided to rent a car instead and explore nearby Parque Nacional Lanin, famous for its Volcan Lanin, which straddles the Argentine and Chilean border. The day turned out to be overcast and with a slight drizzle. We were given a 2 door little Chevrolet Corsa with a 1.4 liter engine and 90 horsepower and no power steering. I was naive to think that power steering is ubiquitous these days. In light of the weather and our sore legs, we decided to drive to a thermal hot springs deep inside Lanin, about 8km from the border with Chile. After we left town, the road quickly turned to dirt, and continued like that the whole way there. At the entrance to the park, we were thoroughly questioned by an army officer about our intentions about not going to Chile and then were told that the road deteriorates further and that our little car may not make it through the giant pot-holes and mud pits. We decided to push ahead. The road did deteriorate and we hydroplaned a couple of times, hit a couple rocks on the bottom of the car and rode over rough ground, but we made it in the end to the thermal hot springs. We knew that the hot springs were in a resort, and were told that there are free hot springs nearby. We came to the resort, were told that an afternoon in their thermal pools would cost us $75 each, and then were told that there are no other hot springs around. We promptly vacated the premises, and found a thermal pool right next to the entrance to the resort. (For those interested, park the car at the turnout just before the driveway to the resort, and scramble up the mountain on the path directly across the road from the turnout. The turnout is about 10 feet from the entrance to the resort) The pool was a bit shallow, but there were two large plastic pipes going into the forest from the resort. We decided to follow the pipes into the forest to see if we could find more hot springs. After much searching we found a creek and thought the it had some hot spring nearby, and after some scrambling around, came to the sad conclusion that there was not another pool of hot water. We contended ourselves with the first pool and drove back to town. Our visit to San Martin de los Andes was topped off with a delicious steak dinner and then we flew back to Buenos Aires.
More about that in the following post.
