The day we arrived was sunny and 70, if a bit windy, and we gazed around in awe at the towering mountains and white-capped waves of the lake.
But it's good that we got a look around, because the next day a storm rolled in and it POURED rain for two days straight! Straight down, straight sideways, maybe even straight back up, the wind and rain did not let up at all for a good 48+ hours, so we had a forced indoor recuperation time after the 23hour bus ride into town.
Just when we were getting antsy, two fellow hostel guests, Nestor and Monica, graciously offered us a tour of the area in their van, since it had just been repaired and they wanted to take it for a test drive before they left the following day for the coast. We drove out of town to the Hotel Llao Llao, pretty much the fanciest, most expensive hotel in the country, if not the continent. Done in a European hunting lodge / Canadian mountain retreat style, it reminded me of the photos of Fairmont Hotels in Banff and Lake Louise or Whistler, complete with the impeccably dressed staff and stunning scenery complemented by the rustically grandiose architecture. Wow.
We also drove through a soggy Colonia Suiza, a (you guessed it) Swiss settlement of quaint chalet-style houses and dirt roads famous for it's Curanto, meat cooked while buried underground. We didn't get to sample it that day, but as we're only a hundred kilometers south for the next month or two, we can always go back!
When the rain finally cleared the next day, we took Nestor and Monica's advice and hiked up the mountain just to the west of town, Cerro Otto, to check out the views from the rotating restaurant on top.
And we thought the scenery was pretty from IN town!!
The hike was fantastic, and we were famished by the time we reached the top, only to spend our last bit of cash on the tickets for the gondola/funicular and entrance to the cafe/museum/scenic overlook and discover they only accept MasterCard at the restaurant!! Isn't VISA everywhere you want to be?!?!
Hungrily, we rode the gondola back down the mountain, where we found an ATM and extracted cash, but discovered we were now in a restaurant wasteland and had to hoof it 4km back into town before we could find food! Talk about working up an appetite!
Great, beautiful day overall :)
Other than that, we pretty much just hung around town, twiddling our thumbs and lounging at the hostel while Jay continued his epic ride from desert to hill to ashy lakes* to us!
* last summer, around June, a volcano just inside the border of Chile began spewing ash and it has been drifting and settling and causing general ashiness all over the region around and to the north of Bariloche, including Villa Angostura and the seven lakes district Jay biked through.
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