From Buenos to Bariloche

The Actual Leaving:

After wrapping up a few loose ends in Buenos Aires with incredible haste, I jumped on the bus to Bariloche.

There seemed to be only Argentines entering, so I was excited to get an opportunity to practice my Spanish... but I ran into a strange surprise when I got to my seat. Instead of meeting an Argentine, I found myself next to an overly-talkative Korean man named Kim. Kim had made it a point not to learn a single word of Spanish in his months of travelling. I talked to him for a long time about essentially nothing before I got really bored and pretend to fall asleep. He's an author/artist in Korea, and obsesses way too much over the obvious. I'll leave the Kim business at that... at least he kept me awake to take that shot of the sunset on the horizon.

Exploring People and Places in Bariloche:

I ended up in my hostel room with a group of 5 Brits from Manchester traveling together. They turned out to be an awesome group and I got along well with all of them. That night I acted as their Spanish translator and we went on a hilarious 'empanada crawl' in Bariloche. Some pizza place that cooked them freshly took the prize.

We spent the first full day biking around the "micro circle." It was an amazing time for lots of reasons, but mostly because everyone wanted to do completely crazy and ridiculous things the whole time. We started just by riding up hills that weren't meant for bikes, like the road to the fancy hotel Llao Llao, where the picture on the left was taken.

That, however was the least exciting part of the excursion. Farther down the trail me Jaime, and Lawrence ended up cutting into the woods and climbing through the canopy to get a unique view of Lago Escondito. I managed to snap this picture of Jaime moving through the treetops.

Afterward we got stuck in the bamboo forest below, but eventually worked our way back to the normal path and had lunch by the lake. This was the first of several off-the-trodden-path experiments... and it really showed me how much more I could enjoy my experiences simply by knowing that they were unique. Peer pressure drove us off the path, and I'm not gonna lie, some of my greatest discoveries have happened as the result of peer pressure and mob mentality. The extremes that those things are responsible for are pretty interesting, but I won't explore my philosophical reflections on the power of collective thinking here.

I will, however, talk more about exploring in general. It's no coincidence that every single one of my pictures came from the things we found off the main trail (which was still very beautiful itself). The second time we diverged from the road was actually twice removed from the main trail. We accidentally went about 15km off the map and ended up on a difficult and poorly marked road. It was from that road that we went off into the woods and found a beautiful waterfall. We filled up our water bottles with some of the most deliciously pure, cold water I've ever tasted, and relaxed there for a while. I convinced the group to take a trek up into the hills since they looked fairly climbable. I wanted to see where the waterfall came from. I expected a pond or something of that sort, but we found far more spectacular things. After a bit of fairly difficult climbing we found a shrine and a statue of the virgin Mary on top of the cascade. This place must have been special to someone, but we could only guess why. It was a surreal sight . . . hard to take any clear and simple impressions from.

Farther up towered a taller, thinner, more spectacular waterfall. That's the one in the picture. Sam took a fall on the way down, and I put my arm out to help him. I think he would have been fine, but I was credited for the first of two times with 'saving' one of them. I'm pretty much one of the greatest heroes that ever lived... anyhow... the waterfall we found felt so peaceful, so inspiring, so uniquely beautiful that it's hard to reflect on the experience without feeling a longing to be out in the wilderness in the quiet.

After coming down from there and riding even farther in the wrong direction we saw an isolated and completely deserted beach. we felt obligated to find a way down to it. After the third random guess as to how to get down there, we managed to find a trail. We weren't disappointed at all. We discovered a private beach with a setting sun and beautifully dynamic horizon - completely unspoiled by civilization or any signs of human activity. It was an amazing day, and after returning to the main road we managed to return the bikes 3 minutes before they had to be back, 10 hours after we started the trip. Good people, good sites, good exercise, great day.