7 Lakes + Extra Day
8th of March (pictures on flickr):
Dave and I got up early as we had to meet Eyal and Rachel early for the car. We ate some of the wonderful breakfast the hostel serves and went to the Marco Polo Inn (where Eyal and Rachel stays), where we found out that Rachel was ill and would stay at the hostel, while Eyal, Dave and I drove around the seven lakes. I felt that renting the car was already expensive, and sharing 286 pesos 3 ways is even more expensive than sharing it 4 ways. But off we got, and even though Eyal was used to automatic gears, and Dave to driving in the left side of the road, everything went fine.
When we came to the first village, we stopped and Eyal and Dave had some mate (I tasted it, and found it much too sweet as Eyal had added sugar), and we got to try some Havanna chocolate biscuits, really good.
We continued on and made it to San Martin, which is the end of the line; here Eyal and Dave played 3 games of pool, which ended in a 1-2 score in Eyal's favour. I should mention that on this day there was extraordinarily grey, with the latter part of the day having rain. But the views were absolutely gorgeous, and I can scarcely imagine what it would be like on a very good day. We eventually made it back to Bariloche (around 21 o´clock) after a long beautiful day, and finished the day by eating at a fantastic Mexican restaurant called DÃaz de Zapata (days of shoes) where all of us had fajitas.
Back at the hostel, Dave, Reut, two Israeli girls and I sat down and talked from about midnight till 2 in the morning, it was very nice, but by that time I was absolutely knackered
9th of March:
I really don't like "these days". Especially the weather played tricks on us; yesterday when we drove around the 7 lakes we had bad weather, and for the entire duration of this day, I didn't see one cloud... Not even the tiniest wisp of cloud at the edge of the horizon, it was just blue, blue, blue and blue. But the day wasn't without thrills, for example I spent an hour walking to the bus stop, bought my ticket for the 10th, and walked an hour back!
But both Dave and I had overslept, as we were supposed to be up early to return the car. But Eyal came round and made sure we got up and ate breakfast. We then (all 3 of us for some reason) went to return the car, which to our surprise happened very frictionless (they always try and go for some more money).
After doing a check of my picture DVD #2 (DVD 1-3 made it home to my father by mail, but DVD 2 didn't work) which works, I went back to the hostel and met up with Reut, Dave and the two Israeli girls, and together we went to the chocolate museum in the town. Few people know this, but Bariloche is famous (don't know about worlds famous, but certainly famous) for its chocolate, I don't know why as I don´t really like it (what's with dry marzipan?) but the museum was cool, it was about the history of chocolate from a worldly perspective, and the benefits of chocolate (such as endorphin).
Later in the day, Eyal, Dave and I went for dinner at a fantastic Argentinian steakhouse, it had been recommended by more or less everybody here in Bariloche, and what a treat it was. All of us ordered 500 gram steaks, and while Eyal and Dave are both somewhat bigger than me, they more or less fought to get the last pieces down, whereas I was still hungry afterwards (yup, really). However I didn't eat more, I actually had a chance when we afterwards went to a microbrewery bar, where Dave and Eyal both had 8 small glasses (each) with different beer in every single one of them, I realised that it would just be a waste of money, I had had more then enough food, and it was quite a pricey place for food, so I didn't eat and went to bed when we returned back.