Chaska in South America

Wow! Tonight is my last night in Argentina. I have to really hurry with this post because I don’t have much time! The south was absolutely beautiful…breathtaking really. Matt and I spent a week total down there…two full days travelling (22 hours on the bus each way!) and 5 nights in hostels in the south. We started off in San Martin de Los Andes and spent two night there. The weather was awesome and we were able to take full advantage of it and went biking and hiking. The town is adorable and really looks exactly like any mountain town in the States or anywhere else for that matter. Here are a few photos from our time in San Martin.

This a view of the lake in San Martin taken when Matt and I rented bikes one day. The water in the lake was an amazing color of blue…not sure if the photo really does it justice!

Another photo of the lake taken along the bike ride.

We biked over to the other side of the lake to this little beach called Playa Catritre. The water is so high right now though that there isn’t much of a beach. We had packed ourselves a lunch and ate it here…it was so peaceful and beautiful. There are campgrounds here, but they weren’t opened for the season yet.

Later that same day we took a hike up to a lookout point on top of one of the mountains called Mirador Bandurias. Well, here’s a shot of Matt just before we lost each other…we took different paths and never found each other again! I made it to the top but Matt ended up on the edge of huge boulder and had to turn around 🙂 .

Here’s me at the top…it was soooo beautiful. Too bad Matt couldn’t enjoy it 🙂 .

Here’s one of the views from the lookout point. It was actually located on an indian reservation for the Mapuche Inidians…the Native Americans from this region. You can see some of the houses and stuff from the reservation in the distance. I walked through their little village and even stopped to talk to a couple Mapuche women. They were incredibly friendly and reminded me so much of North Amercan Native Americans…the same love and respect for nature.

After San Martin de Los Andes, we took what is called the route of the 7 lakes with a small tour group. The weather was freezing and rainy this day, but it was still a really beautiful trip and the guide had a ton of interesting things to say. We ended the tour in a town called Villa la Angostura, where Matt and I left the group and stayed in a hostel for a night. It is a really cute little town with a lot of hiking and stuff to do around it, but the weather was really bad, so we barely left the hostel!

A waterfall along the route of the seven lakes. The scenery in this region is really amazing! It was a really great time of year to visit too since there was so much water and the flowers were in bloom.

One of the sevel lakes.

Another one of lakes…ok that’s all the lake shots I’ll show, I have like a zillion and they all look the same more or less!

Matt and I in Villa la Angostura.

Our hostel in Villa la Angostura was so nice…and only $6 an night!

After Villa la Angostura we went on to Bariloche, which is the biggest of the towns we vistied. It’s a really popular town for skiing in the winter. The weather was even worse there! It was FREEZING, rainy, and even snowy. It didn’t snow in the town, but we tried to take a hike down from a small mountain one day and it was snowing, windy, and completely covered in fog at the top so we couldn’t. Bariloche is really nice though, and we had a lot of fun in our hostel, where we met a lot of really cool people.

The middle of town in Bariloche.

Some snowy mountains in Bariloche.

Matt and I took a cable car up to the top of the little mountain we were going to hike down. You can see in the photo that we’re going straight into fog.

A view of the lake in Bariloche…I know it looks like all the other lakes!

Here are some of the friends we met in our hostel in Bariloche. We stayed a really cool place called Perico’s with a really good atmosphere. The guy in the back is Austin from Colorado. The guy in the front is Victor from Spain.

Here are some other friends at breakfast our last morning. The one in the glasses is Caroline, from France. The other is Katie, from England.

This is our friend Grace, an Argentinian woman we first met at our hostel in San Martin. She happened to be on the same tour with us to Villa la Angostura, at the same hostel as us there, on the same bus ride to Bariloche, and then we happened to run into her again at the bus station as we were leaving Bariloche!

Well, that was our trip to Patagonia! We got back to Buenos Aires yesterday afternoon and had a super busy day getting some important things done before we leave. Today is a holiday here, so we had to do everything yesterday. We’re staying with my friend Carina and she surprised us today with a going away lunch and invited a bunch of friends. We went to a really typical Argentinian restaurant and had a great time. I’m going to miss Argentina!!! I have really come to love it here. It’s funny, my first impressions weren’t the greatest, but now I can honestly say that I will always have a soft spot in my heart for this country (sorry for sounding cheesy.)

Here we all are at our good-bye lunch today…Maiko, Carina, Matt, me, Gustavo, Anita, Cynthia, and Jose Luis is taking the picture.

We went for ice cream after (Argentina has awesome ice cream!) Cynthia, Matt, Estefania, and Carina.

Me, Jose Luis, Maiko, and of course Gustavo 🙂 .

Tags: Travel

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