El Bolson

After a disastrous rather quick visit to Puerto Madryn we headed to El Bolson as soon as possible. The journey was one of the best we have had, cama all the way!

– we slept through the night journey and woke up in El Bolson. Thankgod for the amazing Argentinean buses with bed seats!

El Bolson is a small town south of Bariloche in the Lake District area of Argentina. After a quick hot choc we headed out to find a Cabana (Ems thoughts were to hide for a while and just watch TV and cook our own food). We found a gorgeous place to stay, ´El Surco Cabanas´.

El Bolson was a particularly quiet sleep town surrounded by huge beautiful mountain ranges. The so called ´non-nuclear municipality´ had a friendly atmosphere and a hippie market on the Tuesday morning selling everything from cheese, chocolate, jam and cherries to rather scary painted foam hand puppets, a variety of witch like ornaments and an array of herbs and plants. We attempted to buy a few presents during our visit but was not too successful (oh except for the chocolate for ourselves!)

A lovely lady called Betty owned the cabanas however conversation was interesting with the lack of our Spanish speaking and her English understanding. Betty was so helpful and even let us take her mountain bikes out for the day! Well, out of pure kindness we attempted to ride them to the mountains. With a slight adjustment to the wobbly seat angle (painfull for Robert), a good pump up of the forever flat tyres, and a practice at the peddling backwards to slow the bike down, we managed to get about 5 minutes down the road. Sorry Betty but we don’t think the bikes had been rode for a very long while. We did try.

As the town was so sleepy we spent the majority of the time in our warm cabana enjoying our home cooked food, gorgeous red wine, numerous beers, and many card games of ´shit head´ (by the way Em is currenlty in the lead)! We said a sad goodbye to Betty and headed to Bariloche excited about christmas. Betty gave us some jam for chrimbo too - bless.

´It seems betty was warned of Emily´s cooking - hence the fire extinguisher!!´