San Martin de los Andes

We hopped on our double-decker semicama bus out of Buenos Aires on Tuesday evening. A semicama is Argentina´s coach class version of overnight buses--there´s plenty of legroom, the seats recline 140 degrees, and they feed you one hot meal and a couple of cold ones. They don´t, however, let you choose your beverage (Sprite was our only option) or give you pillows or blankets (luckily we had a blanket). The bus ride was 22 hours long-- and we spent the time watching the beautiful scenery change from dry grassy plains with tumbleweeds, to red dirt and rock with buttes and plateaus, to fertile farm land with streams and hills to rugged snow capped mountains with streams and lakes. Taking the bus turned out to be a really good way to see how varied the landscape is in Argentina and it reminded us a bit of what driving across the US might look like. We spent the darker hours of the ride watching cheesy music videos and bad US movies with Spanish subtitles. We finally arrived in San Martin de los Andes on Wednesday around 6pm and headed to one of the few hostels in town.

San Martin is a mountain town of about 26,000 people. The town booms with tourists during winter and summer, but we came at the end of spring. The town and hostel weren´t very busy, which meant we had a few nice relaxing days there. But it also meant certain buses that take you into the national park weren´t running and some activities weren´t available (we couldn´t rent a canoe or kayak to take out on the lake).

So we spent only two days in town. We spent part of our first day walking around downtown window shopping--most of the stores were closed since they close at about 1pm for lunch and siesta and reopen around 5. Afterwards, we hung out on the beach of the lake. The water was perfectly clear and beautiful, but way too cold to swim in. We also juggled a bit and ended up trying to teach a little kid how to juggle with our broken Spanish (Jill did a great job with this).

The following day, we went on a hike to the Mirador, which was a nice vantage point that allowed you to look out over the town and lake. The hike was relaxing and pretty. When we got to the top we could see how far the lakes and the mountains stretched-- all the way to Chile! To get there, we had to pay to enter the land of a Mapuche tribe. We walked around their village for a little bit. The parts we saw included a school, a restaurant, several houses, and lots of free range farm animals.

We spent 3 nights at the Babel hostel, where we met some nice folks from Mexico, Spain, and Denmark. It was really interesting to talk with them about culture and language differences, as well as politics. Now we´re in Bariloche, which is a much larger town, so we´re hoping more activities will be available to us!´

We´ve had some difficulties uploading photos, so we´ll get more posted as soon as we can!