Friday 22 December 2006

Bariloche to pure relaxation

We've made some good progress so far, and decided to take a rest day before heading south along the famous route toward Patagonia and eventually Tierra del Fuego. We'll hook a right after a couple hundred km back into Chile and save the rest of that journey for another day!

As with every hotel so far, breakfast is in the price. I've been happy with all of them, none of them have left me with the feeling that they were inadequate. We lingered a while and had a few cups of tea. The walls are lined with booze bottles that are squished flat (melted?), but I don't get it because the labels are in tact.

We head out for some window shopping, all we really need is some aloe vera and I want some tall socks to keep my aching achilles warmer.

Next few hours include buying stickers, having coffee, strudel, chocolates, and lunch. We generally amuse each other just by our mutual presence, we don't do this idle stuff together often.

We make our way over to the local museo, it's got nature stuff, native history and history of exploration. I'd say that one of the strong themes was how much they like to talk about how they arrived at the current border line with Chile, no different than US and Canada really, we all like to emphasize how we're different/better than the neighbours.

The hilight for me was seeing a stuffed condor and a stuffed albatross. Both are larger than I expected by far (pictures to follow). The wingspan of the albatross is 1' longer than my stretched arms, which are a hair over 6", and it's wings aren't fully extended.

After that it's more window shopping, tea, nap and some afternoon cartoons.

We're hungry, but restaurants don't open till 8 so we stop by a pub first. They've got a bigscreen showing David Bowie live doing Nirvana covers... odd. Dinner is a 5 minute walk away at a pasta and pizza joint. I go for canneloni, Tori goes for the house special pizza, which ends up being mucho queso blanco y huevos. A little odd once again but palatable since the ingredients and preparation are good. We opt for a bottle of vino tinto de la casa for 12 pesos. It's hard to turn down perfectly tasty local wine at $4. After dinner, spending catches up to us when I pay $8 for getting two camera memory cards burned to CD (2 copies of the CD). Seems like a decent deal, but it's even better when I have free memory card space to snap a few pics of the General Lee we pass. Not a real Dodge Charger, but a very impressively done replica considering how far we are from Hazard County.

It's been rainy all day, but forecast for tomorrow is improved. If it's raining tomorrow as hard as it was today I might make up more excuses not to ride. Having said that, truthfully my left calf/achilles "interface" is more sore than I've ever experienced. Walking was painful, I had to try hard not to limp.

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