We're in Baraloche at the moment. It's the centre of the Argentine Lake District, but Windermere it ain't. It peddles hiking, ski-ing (not much of that at the moment) and chocolate. This is our last stop in Patagonia before heading to Buenos Aires for some cosmopolitan modernity.
We arrived in El Chalten last Friday. It's a new "town" that wasn't there 20 years ago. In yet another Argentine border dispute, this time with Chile, they created the place from nothing to claim the lump of land it's on. You really have to see the maps produced here. They're a wish list of future land grabs and include chunks of other countries marked as Argentine. They claim a large chunk of Antarctica (international territory), the Falklands and South Georgia (ours) and land along the borders with Uruguay and Chile. Their theory appears to be if you include the land on your maps and TV weather forecasts, the people currently live there will give up protesting and join the happy family that is Argentina (along with the rickety economy and unstable politics). Anyway. I digress. El Chalten may not have mobile telecommunications, a bus station or bank, but it does have some of the best countryside and hiking in South America. We did two day-walks amongst the lakes and mountains returning each night to our comfy hostel room, microbrew and ridiculously soft mattresses that gave the both of us sore backs.
After El Chalten we took a two day trip up Route 40, a mainly unsealed road that runs the spine of the Andes, to Esquel. The middle night we stayed at Perito Moreno in a hotel that definitely hadn't been decorated since the 1970s - orange and brown were the only shades in the decor's colour scheme and the plastic sofas were just embarrassing.
Esquel is a pretty average, if soulless, town but it does have a steam train. It leaves the town station, goes around in a loop without stopping and ends up back where it started. We skipped the ride but saw it set off, watching excited Argentines go all doe-eyed in nostalgia.
There weren't main foreigners around the town. The main reason we went there was so I could go to Trevelin, a small village up the road. At the end of the 19th century a load of welsh immigrants landed on the Patagonian coast to settle the rather dry and barren pampas. They kept moving inland, settling towns as they went until they got to where Trevelin is now. Being of welsh stock myself, I was interested to see just how welsh it was, and the answer was not a lot. The odd street was named after a Dylan Edwards John Thomas Jones Davies, but the welsh character was mainly restricted to the museum (where the lady behind the counter started talking welsh to me as soon as I said "yaky da", and there was a good selection of welsh memorabilia) and the tea shops. Now I always associated cream teas with Cornwall, but they're considered a very welsh thing here and they are very, very large. Five types of cake, scones, sandwiches and a bottomless pot of tea. I was feeling decidedly sick, but happy, at the end.
The next day we paid 40 quid to see a 2,600 year old tree. The trip to the Alerce National Park took a coach, a walk, a boat trip and six hours. The guides wouldn't stop talking the entire way there, barely coming up for air and unfortunately they were only speaking Spanish. When we got there the guide showed us the really old Alerce trees and spoke about them in Spanish for a few hours before continuing to describe all the other really interesting trees (in Spanish) too. Tall ones, short ones, wide ones, broken ones. I know trees do a really useful job with the oxygen and carbon dioxide and stuff, but I feel I've had my fill of trees for now, 2,600 years old or not.
Baraloche is a very quaint town and a lot busier than the other places we've been to in Argentina. Yesterday we had a look around town and bought some of the famous chocolate from the place the guide book says sells the best. I reckon if you're going to make yourself sick, you might as well do it with the best.
Today we made some sandwiches and had a hike around Llao Llao National Park. Sounds welsh, but isn't. Great mountainous scenery and plenty of lakes. And more trees. Ah, the trees...
Dan's put his trainers on the window sill to air, but they're still to close.
Rich.
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