With no New Years resolutions except to enjoy the rest of the trip, we left for Bariloche in Argentina. We are now 2 trucks running parallel, Bernie and Magaly, with 45 people in total. Unfortunately Bernie didn't quite make it to the campsite in Bariloche as planned, as it broke down 50m down the road at the supermarket! The first full day was spent wandering around town on a 'chocolate crawl', which essentially consisted of going into all the chocolate shops along the main street and tasting all the samples of chocolate provided :) This was an all day excursion as you can imagine as there were an awful lot of chocolate shops in Bariloche. We also managed to fit some lunch (salad to balance out the chocolate) and some shopping along with the sights of Bariloche into our busy chocolate filled schedule. Finally we made it to the last shop - Rapa Nui (Easter Island) which had the most amazing flavour combinations of ice cream! We all had different flavours, 2 generous scoops each - Lemon meringue pie with real Italian meringue on top, Passion Fruit and Kiwi, 80% Cocoa Chocolate, Dulche de Leche (caramel), Tramontana (a combination of choc covered biscuits, dulche de leche and vanilla ice cream) and my favourite, which was chocolate ice cream with huge blobs of dulche de leche and honeycomb. It was so good, it gave me temporary amnesiaa and still cannot recall the name!! I also indulged in a small bottle of Chocolate Liquor, which was very sweet but eminently drinkable. The next day was spent in repentance for the chocolate orgy by cycling 35km around the Circuito Chico. Although the hills were many and long, the scenery was beautiful and the smell of warm pine trees made it worth it. The lakes and mountains are similar to those of the Alpine region in Europe, which explains why this particular part of Argentina was particularly popular with Swiss and German immigrants - hence the chocolate, the St Bernards dogs (complete with brandy barrel), gnomes and wooden buildings are particularly prevalent here. The best part of the cycle was of course the downhill, where I was able to use my skills learnt from the downhill Death Road in Bolivia. Currently we are in the middle of a 2 day drive to El Calafate, through the steppe of Patagonia, with high winds, bumpy roads and very little in the way of vegetation to hide behind
