Bariloche: Part One

Day One – Recovery

The 26 hour bus has taken its toll on us physically and mentally. Arriving sapped of energy, we check into our Airbnb for the week. Spacious, modern and clean, it ticks all the boxes. We build up the courage to brave another supermarket. Being a Sunday the stocks are low but we scramble enough ingredients to make a few meals. We note the tape across the alcohol aisles, it turns out that the sale of booze is prohibited due to today being election day! Back at home, we make a basic meal and crash out in front of the TV watching a studio Ghibli film. Checking the voting results before bed which confirm Milei has won the election!

Day Two – The Great Escape

We wake to find the weather is pretty miserable, cloudy, windy and cold. We decide to head into town to get a feel for the area and explore the picturesque Bariloche we’ve been looking forward to. It seems our Airbnb is not in the scenic Alpine-esque area but the built-up edge of town full of graffiti, endless kiosco shops and mechanics! Eventually we reach the center of town and find this beautiful church. The heart of the town is still a built-up concrete jungle. Sure there are fondue restaurants and a ridiculous amount of chocolate shops but it’s not the Swiss village we were expecting.

Wondering what to do having seen most of what the town has to offer, we stumble upon an escape room center. Amused by the fact they have a ‘World Cup’ themed escape room, we figure we’ll be spontaneous and book straight into the next available game. We’re advised to try the ‘Lab’ themed room as apparently it’s their easiest with a 7/10 difficulty rating!

Despite a few technical scientific words in Spanish we make a good start. We struggle in the middle and only open the second main room with 15 minutes remaining. Blitzing through we somehow (with a bit of cheating/luck) make it to the very last puzzle as the time runs out. We’re locked in the lab forever, end of blog…

In reality, we return home and plan the rest of our week. Fortunately for me, the nearest eatery is a take-away pizza place which offers the ‘Fugazzeta’. This is essentially a pizza with an extra middle layer stuffed with cheese! In my poor Spanish I communicate what I want and I’m gutted to hear the Fugazetta machine is out of order 😭. I must settle for a standard pizza and some empanadas, tightly clutching them home through the 70km/h wind. While I’m out foraging for food, Alex is back home cooking up some delicious brownies 😋

Day Three – SUBE or not SUBE, that is the question… The day that goes wrong.

Our plan for the day is to head up to the Campanario viewpoint a few miles out of town. To get there we need to use a SUBE card, similar to an Oyster card in London. The Airbnb host was kind enough to lend us one so we don’t need to buy one ourselves. We try to top it up at the local mini-market, the owner explains it needs to be topped up with cash (which we don’t have) but this one time she’ll do it with a card. Alex rightly points out we’ll probably need cash later so we head back to the flat to pick up some foreign currency to exchange later. Take two, we head down to the bus terminal and wait for our no. 10 bus. As we board, we’re greeted with a big red X and the driver explains the SUBE card has been blocked by the owner… Back to square one.

We enter the chaotic bus terminal full of excited children running riot and confused gringos. After queueing up several times at the wrong place, we finally learn we can buy a SUBE card here in the main bus terminal but we can’t top it up here (!?). With our empty card we have no choice but to walk 45 minutes into town.

You may wander why we don’t simply withdraw cash from an ATM. It’s due to the confusing ‘blue dollar rate’ where we can get over 1,000 pesos per £1 (which we get when paying on our debit cards) but if we withdraw from an ATM we’ll get the local rate where £1 only gets us 350/400 pesos. Quite a stark difference.

We try several money exchange shops, being passed from pillar to post. After seeing the massive queue in Western Union, one of the only somewhat reliable ways to exchange USD for pesos, we’re told our best option is to change money on the street. The only legitimate looking people we find refuse to change anything other than $100 bills, oddly stating they don’t have enough pesos to change our $20 bill. We find a man stood next to a group of suspicious looking youths and ask if he can change our Chilean pesos to Argentinan currency. He advises we follow him through the group of youths, up a shopping arcade to a liquor store. Somehow he quotes us a fairly decent rate and in our desperate situation we agree. Money is exchanged in a flurry and it all seems a bit under the counter but we finally have local currency!

Now we simply need to add the cash to our SUBE card in a local shop. Except the only ones we can find are closed. Trying to top it up on a website doesn’t look to be an option either. We walk around town for another 30 minutes until we find an open kiosco that can add cash onto the SUBE. This whole ordeal since we left the flat has taken several hours for the sake of a 160 peso (around 16 pence) journey. Alex attempts a little sob on the pavement while I console her but we can’t even do that right as we’re told by a local to move out of the way of their gate.

We restore some sanity by having a hot chocolate with cognac in a local chocolate shop/cafe which bizarrely has an ice-rink inside!

We finally board a busy bus and by the time we reach our intended destination it’s approaching 3pm. We begin the walk to the viewpoint and find a nice spot in the forest to enjoy our empanadas and snacks.

The walk up has been described as a ‘jaunt’ but it’s a brutal steep uphill for 30 minutes straight. The view at the top is beautiful though and we ponder whether we should have paid to take the chairlift up and save our legs. We take a few photos and seeing the long queue for the chairlift back down, decide to walk it instead.

Another hurdle we’ve had today is to try and book a massage and entry to a stunning spa overlooking the lake. Their phone line was always busy, they didn’t reply on WhatsApp or Facebook and their website won’t accept our debit cards due to more generic error messages… We decide to stop there on our way home, determined we’ll have a relaxing day after the trauma of today. The spa receptionist helpfully explains the website ‘does not work’ and manually books us in for Thursday. Sick of buses and the complexities of the public transport system, I book us an Uber to take us back to the Airbnb. Of course the driver misses the turn on the way home and we end up in the middle of nowhere, down a gravel track, performing endless U-turns while he tries to find his way back. It seems here the buildings get built before the roads. What a day.

Earlier on, while in town, we tried to book a place for dinner tonight to have something to look forward to. The fondue place Alex had found was closed on Tuesdays and the best steak restaurants don’t take bookings, it’s first come, first served. With this in mind, we head into town early to join the queue before the steak restaurant opens at 8pm. There’s already a big queue outside the original El Boliche but luckily its sister restaurant around the corner only had a handful of people waiting. After the day we’ve had we enjoy a fantastic meal of huge slabs of steak, pyramids of fries and a lovely bottle of red wine at £3 a bottle!

Inevitably there’s a sting in the tail as my Uber has been blocked because the payment for our earlier journey cannot be debited. Alex has to book the ride home on her account and as soon as we’re home her account is also blocked. It appears there are common issues with Uber not accepting foreign bank cards out here.

Exhausted and drained we head to bed. I check my phone and see the spa has finally replied ‘Hi James, how can we help?’.

Day Four – Anguish in Angustura

As the weather has improved, we’ve decided to take a day cycling around the town of Villa La Angostura. Booking into a private bus is much easier than the debacle we had yesterday and we’re in Angostura by 10.30am. We stock up on empanadas at a local bakery and find the bike hire shop Alex has picked out. A jolly chap called Ariel greets us and provides an explanation of the route, going into great detail! He states it’s for tourists, not athletes and we’ll have no trouble. In an unexpected twist he then gets a book off his shelf and takes another 10 minutes talking about when a volcano erupted in Chile and the wind blew the ash all the way over here and covered the town in ash. Eventually he takes us outside and provides the equipment we came here for.

We cycle to the national park along the busy road, passing a Gothic church built by the same architect that designed Bariloche, before descending down a huge downhill. The route though the National Park is a 24km out and back. Wanting a change from day-long hikes we’ve made the smart decision to bike it instead. Or so we think. The wardens at the park ticket office suggest it’s harder on bikes and the signs have yellow ‘medium’ difficulty for walkers yet red ‘hard’ difficulty for cyclists… Great.

It soon becomes clear why. For the first 1.5km we more-or-less need to carry our bikes up steps or push them up rocky inclines too steep to cycle up without any momentum. When we finally reach a downhill section it’s too dangerous to cycle down and someone sadly lost their life here, so there are barriers to prevent any cyclists with a death wish. Exhausted from this ordeal we can eventually start cycling around 2km into the trek! The route is narrow and bumpy, the declines are steep and full of tree roots and the inclines are punishing in equal measure.

We find some sort of groove and stop for lunch around what we think is the halfway point. Fueled by empanadas and Gatorade (how we missed you) we power through to the end in what seems like no time at all. We have a wander around the wooden walkway through the forest. Full of Arrayanes trees grown specifically in a sort of one species arboretum.

Alex contemplates the catamaran back to town but that would mean waiting here for a couple more hours in the cold. A fighter as always she decides to cycle back with me come what may.

Surprisingly we find the return a lot easier than we imagined, I dare say we even enjoy it! We take a couple of detours off the main path to marked Miradors. Of course the route ends in the same nonsense of carrying our heavy bikes down steps for nearly a mile but we knew it was coming.

We cycle back to town and Ariel meets us with a rye smile, he knows what we’ve been through but we’re all still smiling regardless. With a bit of time to kill before our bus home we find a local cervecería and reward ourselves with some happy hour beers.

Alex will publish the second half of our week in Bariloche soon (the better half… mostly!)