Twenty-five hours of bus travel brings its own rhythm, where time ceases to have its standard measures and becomes in places slowed but in general quickened. We were on the bus yesterday at 7.45am, and we arrived at Bariloche at 9pm or so. In between time passed in bits and chunks. The most exciting event of the day by 10am was that the bus had a puncture. We had a guide on the bus this time, a luxury not offered to us on the first leg, and he cheerfully explained to me that a car had crashed into the side of the bus the previous day and the net result was that the tire had to be replaced. We were pulled into a petrol station at the time and so the stop there was almost an hour, versus the scheduled twenty minutes.
Most of the stops were short, and they tended to be every three hours, give or take an hour. The first day we stopped in places which redefined my idea of what the middle of nowhere could be – isolated settlements of a few buildings in the great vast nothingness in the Argentinian interior. The entertainment was provided by the dogs, if there were any dogs. Otherwise it was just a question of looking out at the bleak landscape and waiting for the bus to get going again. The second day though provided larger places, and for almost all of the way the road was paved, rather than the gravel road we had on the first day. So though it was slightly longer, day two was a much easier journey.
Looking through the photographs I took it is hard to distinguish one place from another. Most of them were two main streets crossing to form the town centre. One of them had an unusually high number of dogs wandering around, even by the South American standards, and Mike noted that there appeared to be more dogs than people.
We stopped at a place for lunch that was slightly bigger than usual, and had some side streets off the main cross. There was only one place to eat, and the culinary choices were either a sandwich or a pizza slice. We went with the former, and it was a type of meat whose toughness compared not so much to old boots as to the ceramics they use to protect the shuttle on re-entry. I was hungry but could only manage half of it, a rare occurrence. But even that was enough to start a Russian roulette game in my digestive system. And Mike did note that there seemed to be a lot fewer dogs in this town.
Somewhere around half way we saw mountains on the horizon, grey-blue and small compared to some of the giants of the continent. At that point I feel asleep for quite a while, two hours or so, and when I awoke we were among them. The landscape had changed completely, from the sand and scrub that we had seen for so many hours to steep hills and trees and shrubs and plants. The mountain landscape was much closer to Peru or Ecuador than what we had seen of Argentina in the journey to that point.
We were dropped off in the centre of Bariloche. It’s another well-to-do town that gets lots of tourist trade, sitting on the southern edge of a very large lake, built on the lake shore and the hill behind. Looking out at the water it’s easy to forget you are not looking at the sea. Our hostel was only a few blocks away so we walked, accompanied briefly by another guy from the bus who was Israeli. All I learned about him in our short period together was that his backpack was much the same size as himself. He was a small young man, and the backpack was an outstandingly large specimen, festooned with the paraphernalia of camping.
Earlier in the day Mike had got talking to one of the girls from the bus, and the notable facts from the conversation were that she carried a knife for defensive purposes and that she did not stay in hostels that included breakfast in the cost because ‘she didn’t need breakfast’. On the first, I would humbly suggest that there is not a single situation in South America that could be changed to your benefit by introducing a weapon. Even if you have been trained to use it and intended to do so to lethal effect, your interactions with the South American justice system would be intense. But I suspect by far the most likely outcome is that you would inadvertently provide your own murder weapon. On the second point, I have come across quite a few people both on my own and with Mike who are operating under fantastically constrictive budgets. That means lots of camping and sourcing and preparation of your own food, plus many of the best attractions are out of range, and it seems to lead to a rather manic obsession with how much things cost and where a few quid can be saved. Mike has taken to calling these people ‘hyper-milers’.
After our arrival we checked in to the hostel, which is a pleasant and unremarkable place up a steep hill a few blocks from the main square. Most of the check-in time was taken up by the explanation of the rules under which lodging is provided, which seem to boil down to being considerate and not bringing in your own beer. The milers wouldn’t like it. We went out for dinner at an Irish bar we had seen earlier called Wilkenny, confusingly, as if there was some hint of a trademark dispute hovering over the name. We got Irish stew there, which was a decent if soy-heavy copy of the real thing, and we stayed to the early part of the early hours. The end of the bus journey felt like an achievement that needed to be celebrated.
This morning we had intended to get up about ten but in the end we slept it out quite a bit later. Sitting on a bus for two days is a lot more tiring than you might expect, and topped off with a late night we were both tired. And we felt we had earned a day ‘off’. So we took it easy and skipped out on the morning session, emerging from the hostel in time for lunch. Then we went for a daytime look around the town. I had seen a bookshop mentioned on one of the leaflets in the hostel so we went there for a peep, and it was a bibliophilic space of wood and shelves and seats. As I noted to Mike, if I lived in Bariloche and spoke Spanish I would spent a fair bit of time there. After lunch we went to the main museum, which contained the standard mixture of pre- and post-invasion artefacts, illustrating what life had been like before the Europeans arrived and slaughtered everybody through disease if not through a bullet or a blade. My favourite exhibit was a very small canon, where the barrel seemed as though you would have a reasonable chance of using it as a shoulder-mounted weapon. There was another fine canon outside, emblazoned with a large ‘US’ on the metal, and I wonder what is the story behind that one.
There were two more museum we intended to visit. The first was labelled on the map as a dinosaur museum, and it took us a while to track it down. When we did see it from a distance, it was a small shed of the type that was probably in use in an agricultural capacity until recently. It was comically inadequate looking. The chances of a full-size T-rex skeleton were low. So we skipped it. I think what happens is that people come here and find that some of the most interesting dinosaur sites in the world are in Argentina, and then they find that those sites are difficult to get at unless you have a large amount of time, and so these random small ‘dinosaur museums’ have sprung up to cash in on the frustrated desire.
The second place was a ‘chocolate museum’, which gets good reviews online, but we went to the exact spot on the map where it is marked and couldn’t find it. We were in a residential street of houses much lower than the street surface, so we were looking down on them, and we could clearly see that none of them was a museum. Maybe it has closed, or maybe it’s some form of large-scale scam.
We spent most of the rest of the afternoon looking at buses and flights and thinking about how to spend our final week here and where we might be for St Patrick’s day (on a bus, most likely) and so on. It took ages, but I am prepared for that now. Later on we went out for dinner, and we had a drink in the bar next door after. It’s 1am as I write this, and I will be retiring shortly as tomorrow we have an early start for a day-trip that might be less cerebral than the best of what we have done, but will undoubtedly be among the most fun: white-water rafting.
