Returning to Chile after our litte visit to Mendoza, we continued straight down from Santiago to a city called Puerto Montt. Not being the most charming city we've visited on this trip, we only stayed there for one night and then rented a car in order to visit the famous lake district of Chile. We drove around there, visiting lakes, national parks, looked at and climbed tops of volcanoes, camped (though 3 nights were spent in a cabin) and tampered with rain and cold. We then returned to Puerto Montt and rented a pickup truck and drove down to the island of Chiloé. There we did just about the same things, though we also saw penguins, dolphins and tampered with even more rain and cold (apparently it rains 4-5000 mm each year on the island). We had planned to continue down the Carretera Austral, but it proved to be too expensive for our meagre budgets, so we doubled back to the lake district to do some more camping. During the 10 days that the above comprised, we were treated with spectactular views, but were glad to finally continue to Argentina after they ended.
Our second crossover to Argentina was to the town of Bariloche, the country's Switzerland. Like the parts of southern Chile which we had just visited, it was also surrounded by beautiful nature with snow-clad mountain peaks and more lakes. We stayed at a great hostel where the owners treated us to pizza, beer and wine and even drove us to the bus terminal.
The plan was then to go further south in Arentina, to visit glaciers, more penguins, the end of the world (also known as Ushquaia) and the national park of Torres del Paine in Chile on the way. However, when the time came to buy the tickets, the asphalt children in Monica and I decided they'd had enough and instead the two of us bought tickets to Buenos Aires, probably the place we've been most excited to go to on this trip.
So the day before yesterday, our group split: Alex, Nadja and Charles continued south as was planned, while Monica and I headed to BsAs. We arrived yesterday morning, hoping to stay with a friend of Moni's, but as we couldn't get in touch with her we contacted some people from couchsurfing.com and were very graciously invited to stay with Patricio. So at the moment we're living on his floor in an apartment in Palermo and in a Sunday afternoon we managed to visit a market, watch a capoeira graduation and go to a rock concert. Though we've taken it a lot easier today, what with waking up relatively late and now finally catching up on internetting, we're hoping things continue to be busy. As far as we can see, there's no reason for that not to be the case, as we've already found loads of events to go to, a large part of which are free.
Unfortunately, seemingly all computers in Buenos Aires are painfully slow, so it will take a while to upload all the photos I've taken the past few weeks. On the other hand, our access to computers is better now, so hopefully they'll all be up relatively soon.
