El Bolson pt 2

So yes, from the posters about eastern religions, the mountain views from town, and the homemade beer selections El Bolson is a lot like Boulder (except no major university to be had).  Although despite the large amounts of people who chose not to wash their hair here I haven't seen any frisbees about town.  So if they are hippies they're not the types of hippies Mike likes to hang around.

Today we had booked a horseback riding trip.  The night before it rained quite a bit and snowed up in the mountains.  The horseback riding trip began normally enough until the driver taking us to the horses just stops and gets out of the car for about 20 minutes talking to another driver.  He comes back and tells us that there is a lot of water so we'll wait and see.  So we wait and then are told that it is okay.  So we arrive at the camp and others are already mounted on their horses.  Mike and I put on our rain pants, fleeces, hats, and coats to prepare for the wet ride.  The other two people who came with us  decided that they would come back tomorrow (we're leaving here tomorrow  so this was not an option).  Then once we're on our horses the other five people also decide that they'd rather come back tomorrow.  We ask if getting a refund is an option.  However, there is no refund option- just today or tomorrow.  So our tour of two plus our guide, Eduardo commences.

The first big difference we notice between this and similar tours is that we're not required to sign a waiver indicating that our free will allows us to embark on this potentially hazardous adventure.  The second thing that is different is that there is no extended lesson on what to do or discussions of the horses names, etc.  We just start going.  My horse seems to like going fast so I ask about the best way to slow him down (since I didn't think I had given him any signal to encourage faster movement).  With my reins ever slightly choked up on we continued our adventure.  I feel like I'm getting the hang of riding a horse again just in time for our first river crossing.  My horse is hesitant (for the first time) and needs to be led into the freezing four feet deep water.  There is some unsteadiness with the variety of rocks underfoot but we make it across the water.  Step by step across the river we go.  At this point Mike is now in the lead since his horse walked straight across.  However, this is not a problem.  Mike is now leading the tour.  Eduardo, the guide, is continually whistling which seems to calm both the horses and me.  The closer we are to the whistling the slower Pedro, my horse, wants to move.  Therefore the new focus is staying close to the guide.  The rain is getting progressively worse as we continue our journey.  Nothing much is said due to the language barrier removing the need for pointless small talk.  We just keep following Mike and our guide just asks us if we're okay every once in awhile which we are.  There are no buildings to be seen- just us and the path climbing alongside the river.  I pondered questions about how long we would be riding and whether or not we should be especially careful of anything due to the conditions.  But we never stop riding.  I feel like on most other horse tours I've been on it is like follow the leader with continual stops to make sure the line is up to standard.  This was not that kind of trip.  At some points the guide is in the lead, then Pedro my horse and I have a go, and Mike is in the front as well.  Sometimes we ride side by side making quick comments about seeing a little sun or about how we wish it would stop raining.  

At last we pull up to a refugio (where backpackers can stay for the night or you can get something to eat).  Damp and cold we both appreciate the tea and opportunity to eat our lunch that we brought.  After lunch it was time to take a walk.  Luckily the rain had let up and the sun was now shining.  We come upon a bridge and he tells us to go one a time.  Mike goes first and then he tells him to look down.  Mike is suspended above the river at a narrow gorge with fast rapids 60 feet or more below.  Then it is my turn to go across.  We each go across the bridge and back and continue our walk along the Cajon de Azul.  Our guide tells us to be careful of the slippery rocks and notes the dangerous signs that mark the edge.  He told us that because of the conditions today we wouldn't go down one path to be on the safe side.  I tell him that that is perfectly okay and that I'd rather be safe then sorry.  He agrees and then goes on to tell us that last Monday someone had died here.  At first we both thought that maybe this had occurred at the bridge and I was relieved that he told us after we had already crossed it.  But no, eventually we came upon another spot and he point to a particular rock and said that the guy was taking a picture of his friend there, had slipped then died.  Needless to say we were particularly careful and I was appreciative that we would be erring on the side of safety.  It was quite an amazing spot and we did take some pictures (with my camera though instead of Mike's which was left behind from this trip)

After the walk we headed back on the horses.  The ride back was fun even though Mike's horse and mine each wanted to lead the way.  We crossed the river two more times and even had a brief time of galloping before the 2 hour trip back was completed.  Luckily our horses picked the more straight level parts for going fast.  It really was a lot of fun to see this trail and have a personally guided tour.  At least now I know that the best way for Mike and I to go the same speed on a long hike is to both be riding horses.

~Suzanne

For me, I had a lot of fun doing the horse ride.  I felt like I actually got to learn how to ride a horse.  Obviously I was no expert but the lack of any real constraints on us gave me a lot of time to learn my particular horse and experiment with him.  My other big impression of this is how obsessed with safety the US is.  Never in a million years would we have done something like this in the States.  Suzanne once took me “horseback riding” out while we were dating, and we had a lot of fun, but it was really just a mule on the flattest and safest path possible, whereas this time, I had a real horse under me!    

~Mike

Note, We have pictures from all of this but the internet connection we have now is satellite which seems to be as slow as dial-up!  They'll hopefully come later.  

El Bolson

We are now in El Bolson.  It is known as the “Boulder”of Argentina.  It is known as such because it is a place that is liberal and open to alternative lifestyles.  A group of hippies established a community here in the 70's and they still seem to be going strong.  Here there is a market every other day that showcases the crafts and food of the people of the region.  We walked through it today and had a great time.  The climate is good for berries and barley and all sorts of tasty things so they also make some very tasty beer as well as berry-flavored beers, which Suzanne likes.  The beer is quite strong, a bottle of it can make me slightly tipsy, but also quite good.  Today we went to a cerveceria or brewery and sampled some of their hand crafted beer and had a good time.  We're staying in our cheapest hostel yet (only 110 Ar pesos a night or $29 US) but the view from our room is fantastic (see below).  Overall I think this place is best suited to our friend Jing, who would not only love the 100% organic and fresh food, but also the amazing amount of stuff to do around this place.  Every direction there is hiking and waterfalls and miradors or viewpoints.  Tomorrow we have booked a tour with a local agency to go horseback riding all day and see some of the sights outside the city.  More on that later.  From there we are starting our adventure south down Routa 40 which is kind of like our Route 66, but still unpaved.  The major attraction down there is the not-receding glacier that calves mini-icebergs into a lake daily in the city of El Calafate.

In other news, we have found a replacement for the Little Man.  He is not quite a little man, but we're going to call him El Chico.  You will hopefully see him in pictures later on.  We have also caught up on our picture uploading.  You can see them at our public gallery.  There is the Bariloche Pt. 2, Seven Lakes Drive, and Villa La Angostura.

Public Galleries

Bariloche

We just spent the last 5 days in San Carlos de Baroliche.  Bariloche is a beautiful town situated on a a very large glacier-carved lake, Nahuel Huapi.  Wikipedia..  We arrived from our long bus journey at around 11.  We were still pretty tired though, since even in the luxury of first class, you're still on a bus moving around while trying to get some sleep.  We checked into our hostel, called “1004” and checked out the amazing views it has.  It is on the top floor of one of the taller buildings in Bariloche and the views are just simply amazing.  While we were there, we took several tours / hikes and the results are in the picture slideshow below.



Overall things are  going very well.  We are really enjoying the sights and sounds.  The hostel we stayed at was a highlight for me.  The staff was very friendly and learned our names and helped us out with tours and rentals.  Most of the guests there spoke English, but very few were Americans.  We found mostly European, Canadian and Australians there.  Overall we're less “extreme” than most of the travelers we found there who would talk about what mountain they climbed a couple of days ago or whatever, which for us is a bit out of reach since all the big mountains around here still have snow covering their tops!

As far as our Spanish speaking skills, we have good days and bad days.  A lot of our time in Baroliche we were with only English speakers so we really didn't get a chance to practice.  Suzanne and I can talk among ourselves in Spanish and understand each other, but its not quite the same as hearing a native speak it as fast as they do.  On the good days we're able to have good, long conversations with someone.  Always a bit slow but we're able to communicate and get our ideas across and understand what people are saying.  But some days we're terrible and just freeze when someone says something.  Mostly its because they speak it so quickly and have the Argentinian idiom of saying “sh” whenever you want to use the “ll” sound that my brain get's overwhelmed.  (insert jokes in comments please).  :)

And many of you may know that we lost our little man.  Pause for moment of silence....  He was with us and doing great on our first big hike and as you can see we have many great pictures of him.  At the end of the hike we let him see out the backpack.  Anyway, we finished our hike and were heading to the bus stop and saw the bus coming.  Since the buses are not that frequent we began to run to the stop and that's where we think the little man fell out.  We didn't think about him again until the next day but when it became clear that he was no longer with us we were soo sad!  If I can't keep the little man safe after only a week of travel, how can I keep my future children safe?  :)  Anyway... now we're looking for someone (or something) to replace the little man, but how can anything replace him?  Someone pointed out that we can use this opportunity to get a new little guy, maybe with a South American flair and there are some here but they're like little gnomes with crazy faces and Suzanne says that they scare her...  So anyway, we're on the lookout.

I'm writing this in our new town, Villa la Angostura which is just across that big lake from Bariloche and we're staying in a hostel in the double upstairs and in the morning a rooster does his thing to wake everyone up, which is quite annoying but tonight I plan to try out my earplugs.  That's it for me, we're thinking and praying for all our family and friends and miss you all.

Ciao!
~ Mike

Our time in Buenos Aires was great with Ximena and Andreas teaching us about local phrases and foods.  They took us all around the city and then accompanied us to the bus station.  From there we headed out on our own.  The bus ride was 20 hours to Bariloche but was quite a luxury experience.  I felt like one of the large people in Wall-E that just sat in a chair and had food/entertainment brought to them.  First came tea, then dinner, then coffee, then just before sleep they asked us if we wanted champagne or whiskey.  Nearly asleep I didn't even understand the question at first.  In hindsight part of the reason I didn't sleep that well (the seat laid down to a full 180 degrees) was the fact that I said yes to the coffee around 10PM at night.  So lesson learned that even though coffee almost always sounds good to me I need to show more self control and not drink espresso before bed.

The drive was very beautiful and Bariloche and the Lake region is truly a special place.  The size of the lakes are truly amazing.  We went on a boat ride for a day to one region, Puerto Blest.  Going slow on the way there it was about a two hour boat ride.  On the way back going faster it still took 45 minutes to get back to the port and this was by no means doing a complete tour of the lake.  The strangest part for me was that we were one of the only boats on the lake.  I think because it is a national park you either need to be on a national park boat or live on the lake (which there are only a handful of places).  The water was incredibly clear.  Then we arrived in this jungle and then I felt like I was in Jurassic Park.  So I started humming the theme song and imagining what I would do if some dinosaur jumped out from the jungle.  They were describing how this region is so wet whereas the surrounding areas are so dry because of the Andes mountains and the water from the Pacific Ocean.  They said that the air condensed on this side of the mountain just like air condenses on your window in the winter so the moisture is trapped in this region.

Bariloche also happens to be the chocolate capital of Argentina.  Up to this point we had not experienced this aspect.  However, after a more lazy day of exploring the town and painting a watercolor we decided to try out the chocolate.  It seemed very early when we went on our chocolate tasting adventure.  However, that night we realized that the coffee and chocolate were actually consumed at 6PM.  So we didn't sleep that well that night either.  Everyone eats dinner around 10:30PM or 11:00PM so 6PM seems like the middle of the afternoon.  The chocolate was very delicious and we saved some of our box for the rest of the week.

On Wednesday we rented a car and drove the Seven Lakes Drive.  This ended up being a twelve hour adventure as lots of the roads were gravel.  We ate lunch on the beach of one of the lakes and Mike and Koven played with their cameras.  On the return trip we thought we were taking the paved road but ended up taking another gravel road through another national park and seeing these interesting  rock sculptures.  With a half hour to spare we returned the rental car full of gas.  Needless to say we slept well that night.

Now we are in Villa La Angostura and are going to hike to see the ancient los arraynes trees on the peninsula.  ~Suzanne

Pictures

Hey everyone,

Don't have time to describe Bariloche in a post yet, but did have time to sort through the pictures we took and have posted them online.  Feel free to check them out here.

~Mike

Buenos Aires

I'm writing this post on the bus to Bariloche at night on the 22nd. It ended up being kind of a long entry, hopefully its not too boring for everyone.

I can't believe this was only our third day in Argentina! Wow. Here's what we've been up to. We slept poorly on the plane into BA. It's hard enough to try to sleep sitting up but when you throw in the fact that my seat control panel broke and I couldn't turn off my reading light, or my TV screen it made for an especially difficult trip. United was nice enough about it though, giving us a little ticket with some gift options as an apology. We chose 7000 miles since that's pretty much all that was applicable. Anyway, we landed and got our luggage, paid the reciprocal fees (130 bucks each!) and got though customs without a hitch. Then we took a cab to meet a friend's boyfriend (the friend was in Chile on work). Andres was awesome. He took us out to eat for lunch and gave us some tips for getting around. We then left our stuff at his office and walked around BA for the afternoon. We saw the Casa Rosada (pink house, same as our White House) and walked through the barrio of San Telmo, which was nice. Suzanne loved the architecture of the city a lot. Then we headed back and met Andres who took us to their apartment. In true Argentinian fashion, we hung out a bit and at around 10 pm went out to eat. Andres took us to a restaurant and introduced us to parillada which is kind of like a smorgasbord of meat of all types. Mmmm. :) We promptly concluded that John N would absolutely love Argentina! We got wine and salad and paid for Andres, all for a whopping 40 bucks after tip! Who hoo! Anyway, we were still very exhausted so we went back after a quick stop at an ice cream shop and went to bed.

We slept till 12:30 pm the next afternoon! We got up and spent the rest of the day walking around the city of BA. It is a lovely city. It's large to be sure but we loved walking around and seeing all the wonderful architecture and watching the people walking around as well. Once we got lost and randomly asked a guy on the street for directions and he was extremely friendly and got us on our way, even trying to speak in English to us gringos! Then, when on the subway, a lady gave us her seat when we walked on. If most Argentinians we meet are this friendly and welcoming then we are for sure in for a great time.

Suzanne's friend Ximena then came back and we all went out for dinner. Ximena was a foreign exchange student who stayed with Suzanne's family in Omaha during her high school years. The girls were so excited to see each other they talked past the time to go out for dinner, which in Argentina is late! So we ended up going out for ice cream again and calling it a night. We then woke up and got ready to go on our long bus trip to Bariloche!

When we were planning on going to Bariloche, we decided to splurge a bit and get the first class bus. Wow. What an experience! The seats fold all the way down to make a nice little bed, they show movies (all movies here are in English with Spanish subtitles), they have already fed us two meals (one with wine) then they came over again and offered us Champagne or Whiskey as an after-dinner drink! The Argentinian countryside so far is very flat and full of farmland. I think between here and the mountains its just all farmland. Suzanne thinks its like Nebraska but I'll let her describe it.

So so far, impressions are great! This place is definitely worth the visit. We've been spoiled so far though. We had friends who pretty much took care of us and helped us through anything difficult. We are so grateful to them! Tomorrow we will wake up and be on our own however and while I'm confident that we'll be able to handle anything that comes up, it's definitely going to be a bit more difficult. I'm looking forward to the challenge.

Just arrived in Baroliche and that'll take a whole other post.

~Mike

On our way

Made our flight out of Houston and are now in Dulles waiting for the flight to Buenos Aires. Our six hour layover is giving us some final time to walk around in the USA. It's funny, it hasn't seemed to hit me yet, even now. It probably won't happen until I wake up from our overnight flight and we're about to land in BA. I have had inklings of excitement and a bit of fear but I have a feeling it'll hit then and I'll be like “WTF are we doing???” :) Or maybe not. Maybe we'll love every second. Who knows?

Our current plan is to meet a friend of Suzanne's (actually her friend's boyfriend) in downtown BA where we will drop off our stuff and wander around for the afternoon in the downtown area before he's done with work and takes us back to their apartment where we will stay until we head down to Bariloche. Hopefully by then we'll have some pictures and first impressions of Argentina and the beginnings of our great adventure!

~Mike

It is hard to know how to say goodbye to family and friends before we begin our adventure. Maybe instead of saying goodbye I should just say we'll talk to you soon. In some ways we may be more accessible when we're on the trip than at home since there will be time dedicated to the blog and we'll have better stories to share. It is crazy to think how much easier it gets to communicate internationally each year between Skype, e-mail, and cell phones. I just got off the phone with my Mom who is visiting my sister in Nigeria. I think it is starting to sink in that we're going on an international trip. When we were in the airport in Houston the flight next to us was going to Denver. Normally that would have been our flight from Texas but this time it was something different. It was like a choice: door #1 to return home vs door #2 to Argentina (via Dulles). Door #2 here we come! To be perfectly honest right now I'm just excited about the warm towel to freshen up in the morning. Between the warm towels and hot tea I always love international flights. In my version of paradise both would be included on a regular basis.
~ Suzanne

It's really happening

Leaving Colorado was hard for us both. I'd been there 5 years and Suzanne 4 and we had a lot of great memories there. What made it even harder was the outpouring of love and support from our friends in CO. Wow, it was truly amazing. From our fantastic going-away party to hosting us in your homes after we were homeless to helping us tetris a huge couch out of our tiny apartment, our friends really showed us how lucky we are. You all make CO feel like a home to us. Thank you!

Suzanne and I are now in Texas, after 16 hours of driving, which is fitting because as we all know, Texas is like a whole other country! I guess its fitting that we start our great adventure here in the greatest of all countries, err, I mean states. Tonight we arrived in Temple and made a list of things we still have to do before we leave and it was a whole page long! Still plenty to do before next Tuesday for sure.