Three-Hour Winter Holiday...

Our final two weeks in Bariloche have been a bit of a blur. There are so many great things to do here, it has been really hard to decide from among them. So we just kept hiking, basically. But not before making another giant parrilla, this time with our Belgian friends (the ones running the hostel mentioned earlier, for those of you scoring at home), and a friend of Jen’s from Spanish school, another Jen, who is American. We decided not to include "Barfy" in our parrilla, but it was really tempting.

We knew to start the fire early this time, and armed with instructions concerning the “correct” way to run a parrilla given to us by our landlord Gustavo, we shaved about 15 minutes off of our previous 3 hour time between lighting the fire and eating the food.

This time we first made a giant fire in the back of the giant barbecue enclosure, manhandled it regularly, and harvested embers from below. Embers from below the fire were then transferred to the area under the motorized grill. Getting the embers out was really fun; I basically took full baseball swings with a poker at the grating holding the logs in place, and nice rosy embers would fall out the bottom.

When our rosy ember collection had grown mighty we started to cook the meats; more chicken, some sausage, and fresh trout with butter and basil. Gustavo came down while the chicken was cooking and asked, with arched eyebrows and a sad tone: “What are you doing to the chicken?”. I was busy opening wine, and the chicken had basically caught fire. I said it was just the sugar in the sauce burning, which may have been about 2% true.

So Gustavo launched anew into the philosophy of parrilla-making and slow cooking meats. Really I think he just wanted to watch me use his motorized grill. I fulfilled his strange fantasy and raised and lowered the grill until I had achieved what he considered to be the optimal grill height.

We had a great time drinking and talking into the wee hours of the night… then morning came, and we remembered our plans for a full day of highly ambitious alpine adventuring. We downgraded the difficulty of our hike several notches, managed to hit the trail feeling a bit weird at about 3:30, and had our tent pitched at Refugio Frey by about 6:30.

Refugio Frey is situated on a Laguna surrounded by a multitude of distinctive peaks called Los Cathedrals, so named because of their resemblance to ornate cathedral spires. We made dinner and watched the sunset, and hustled inside to enjoy a glass of microbrewed beer that is carted up the mountain on horseback! No wonder it cost so much. I could almost taste the horse-feed I was financing as I drank the beer. It was actually really yummy; called Las Cruces, and brewed in the sticks just west of Barlioche.

The next morning we climbed up and over the pass which led back in the direction of some of our previous hikes. It was a beautiful day, very calm and warm, and we enjoyed spectacular views of the valleys all day. Our destination for the day’s hike was the chairlift at the top of the ski-hill on the opposite side of Cerro Cathedral which would gallantly whisk us to the bus at the bottom of the hill. Things were pretty quiet when we arrived to be gallantly whisked. In fact there was absolutely nobody anywhere to press the big green button that would start the chair that would gallantly whisk us. So we didn’t get whisked at all… we walked down to the next lift station, which would surely be operational… but it was the same story there. We could see the beer chilling in the fridges, the big green button that would need to be pressed to start the chair to whisk us, but no people to open the fridges or press the buttons.

So this routine continued for each of the 4 additional lift stations, so we ended up whisking our own tired asses gallantly down rocky ski slopes to the bottom.

During our last week we worked/schooled, and made a point of filling in the gaps in our list of things to do before taking off. Some highlights were renting a Fiat Palio Fire 1.6 (see aggressive little red car in photo) and driving it all over really bad gravel roads. The car was not meant for that purpose, but it worked out fine. I’m glad I didn’t own it.

We did what is called the “circuito grande” which is a tour around nice lakes and mountains up to a little town called San Martin de los Andes. About 75% of the population is made up of St. Bernards, the other 25% humans. The human residents lash themselves to the St. Bernards and charge tourists for photos. That’s the lynch-pin of the economy. A dog revolution in the next five years wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Our last hiking adventure was up to Mount Tronador (see Trogdor the movie, and Trogdor the video game, for more details). Tronador is a must-do, according to all of the guidebooks, so we decided to do. We did, and we are glad. The weather was beautiful both on the way up, during our walks around on the snowy mountain, and on the way down. Sliding down the snow on the backs of our extremely high-tech jackets was very fun, and somewhat bad for our jackets as we discovered a bit later. But, as I have proven with my previous MEC jackets, they are very easy to replace under warranty!

And thus our stay in Bariloche came to an end. What a great place! We were very sad to leave, but also very excited to trundle north to Mendoza, in wine country, to meet up with two of the most accomplished Canadian wine drinkers I have ever met: My parents.