hiking bariloche

laurel on the move

llao llao port

haute chocolate

selves portrait

volcanic ash on the lake

lake district

view from bedroom window

emil says:

stupendous lake vistas with an original personality. vast andean mountain chain collides with an enormous lake district with many islets, isthmuses, and all sorts of other marine structure vocabulary words i can’t recall. the town is a touch touristy and i think where this place excels is if one wants to spend $1000 a day on fly fishing some obscure waterway catching taxidermy-worthy brown trout, alas that’s just not in our budget this time around. hiking, mountain biking, and just exploring are the other ways to go here and it is a fabulously unpretentious and isolated place for such activities.  there is a very genuine feel to this part of south america. sure, north face and patagonia clothing is abundantly accessible for purchase but in this place you need them and the people here, tourists and residents alike, get after it from an adventure/exploration standpoint. off the beaten path, unassuming, and just a genuine destination is bariloche.

laurel says:

first microbrewery of the trip

bariloche has always been on my list of places i wanted to visit.  however, as fate would have it, it just so happened that a massive volcano eruption had been going on since june, crippling the town with ashes and causing the airport to shut down.  at first i thought, what a bummer.  but this turned out to be a blessing in disguise.  because we were not able to fly in, we were ‘forced’ into a 21 hour bus ride from buenos aires.  this afforded us the opportunity to take in the incredible scenery of the lake district.  it also significantly limited the number of tourists in bariloche, allowing us to have a very local and intimate experience.  the highlight for me was the scenic trip along the short circuit, a 30 mile loop thru nahuel huapi national park that shows off some of the most scenic mountain/lake vistas on earth.  we capped off our trip with the most incredible hot chocolate of our lives, at the famous llao llao resort, the star of bariloche where my grandpa chuck and uncle butch had visited on a fishing trip several years ago.