Good-Bye Chile...

Bariloche, Argentina

March 8, 2007
S 41°08.000
W 071°17.900

Our plan for the day was to get from Punta Arenas, Chile to Bariloche, Argentina. This included a flight from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt, a transfer from the airport to the bus station in Puerto Montt, and then braving a 6-8 bus ride to Bariloche. The stars had to completely align for us to get all the way to Bariloche since the only segment that was “locked-down” was our flight… our expectations were low.

We stumbled out of our room in Punta Arenas at 4:30 AM for the local airport, we boarded our flight at 6:15AM and both of us immediately took a little nap on the plane. Our flight landed around 8:15AM in Puerto Montt. Only the first step of many…

We hoped to grab a local bus into town, but we were told the bus wouldn’t be there until 10:00AM. We didn’t want to wait for the bus for fear of misaligning the stars and screwing up our plans for the day. Additionally, we were down to 5000 Chilean Pesos (CLP) and we didn’t want to get more money since our goal was to get out of Chile with as little spare cash as possible. A taxi to the bus station was 7000 CLP, darn! It was about this time we bumped into a fellow American also trying to get from the airport to the bus station; she was also still in a stupor from waking up at 4:00 AM to catch the 6:00 AM flight—we completely understood. She suggested we split a cab to the bus station — this worked perfect for us and we jumped in the cab.

Our next step was to get the first bus to Bariloche; avoiding another night in Puerto Montt. We had a contingency plan in case we couldn’t get a bus, but we really didn’t want to use it. We got to the bus station at around 8:45AM; we hoped it would be early enough to catch the bus to Bariloche. We walked up to the bus counter, I noticed the sign for Bariloche—Todos Los Dias a las 8:30AM. Crap, it was 8:45AM… we missed the damn bus! Then I noticed a little sign right under the first one, Jueves y Domingo a las 10:45AM. Today was Thursday… I repeated the days of the week in order in Spanish to make sure I didn’t make a mistake. I repeated them again. This was too good to be true, we could catch the 10:45 AM bus!

We got to the front of the ticket counter and I asked for two tickets to Bariloche for today. It wasn’t too good to be true, the stars did align, and we bought ourselves two tickets to Bariloche at 10:45AM. It appeared we were going to make it all the way to Bariloche in one, very long, travel day.

After seven hours on the bus, we finally arrived in Bariloche; 14 ½ hours after we departed our hostel in Punta Arenas. We were very excited to be in Argentina after a month in Chile. Excited about all of the new activities, the chocolate, the wine, the beef and most importantly we were looking forward to some different food.

We found a cheap hostel ($33 per night), clean bed, clean bath, and a wonderful view of the lake (see above), we plan on spending at least 3 nights. We ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant that ended up being one of the better meals we have had to date; had some great microbrews at the local pub, and of course sampled some of the best ice cream in all of Argentina.

So far, we like what we have seen of Argentina and we hope we like the rest of it!