Through The Nothing, Part II

I know it’s been a while since I last posted in the blog however the last 3 months have been truly mental. Since the blog is about fun and not about real life and I still have a story to tell, let’s forget about real life again and let’s go back to Patagonia :-)

The last post ended in Perito Moreno, the world’s only town in the middle of nowhere without a pub and this is where the next morning found us. I think the last time Perito Moreno saw any construction activity must have been in the early 70s and the town has a special “lost in a time warp” feel that got only more pronounced in the morning. There are fake wood tables with brown paint peeling off, chairs with fake red leather and everything one can associate with a bygone era.

Through The Nothing, Part I

In retrospect I think nothing could have prepared us for the 1385 km long bus journey from Bariloche to El Chaltén that lasted for 2 full days, had countless and seemingly endless sections of dirt road and let us traverse the... big nothing. When people look at the map of South America, Patagonia seems actually quite small. Well it isn’t. It's a bit bigger than a million square kms which is 4x the UK or 2x France but unlike any of these Patagonia is quite narrow and long with a population of two million people which results in lower densities than Scandinavia. And the big nothing.

Before we embarked on the epic bus journey we had quite a fabulous last day in Bariloche. We exchanged all of our remaining dollars at the best possible black market rate (even my 20 dollar notes got a nice quote after some searching around), did a little hike (since we are lazy bums, we took a chairlift and came down 1000 metres in altitude that hurt us more than walking up), had one last great dinner at Alberto’s (this time without ordering ourselves silly amounts of food) and got pretty drunk with our hosts who invited us to their house before we said our final goodbyes to Bariloche.