El Bolson

After leaving Bariloche, we headed to El Bolson which is a smaill town just south of Bariloche. It is much more quiet (minus the barking dogs and birds that want to be roosters) and surounded by mountains and streams. We had some amazing hikes and views, photos are posted on flickr, but the days are all beginning to blur together. I´ve given up trying to figure out what day of the week it is, the date will just have to do for now. We did one hike on Christmas eve that so far has been my favorite but I did manage to get a couple of battle wounds. If you´ve read Morgans blog you´ll note that he mentions I was trying to cut a new trail with my eyeball. In fact, the overgrowth of bamboo required us to hike mostly bent over, climbing under trees and over brush, fallen trees and rocks. There was one point where I was climbing up, bent over mind you, and when I stood I ran smack dab into a broken tree limb with my eye. Thankfully, I shut my eye just in time and only scrapped my eye lid and got a small cut between my eyes. At some other point I must have scrapped my knee, needless to say it was a bad day to choose to wear shorts for hiking. The sticker bushes were vile, but again if we had stayed on the trail and avoided trying to cut a new one up the side of a cliff things might have played out differently. Something tells me Morgan won´t believe me the next time I tell him "the trail seems to end here, we must need to go that way" (pointing up). The hike gave me fond memories of being a kid exploring in the woods. Its not often you find a fun trail that hasn´t been blazed wide open by frequent travelers. When we asked the guy at the refugio if there was a trail back to the town without retracing our steps he said many try and come back, that was our first clue that it would be fun. Glad we did it. When we got back, we got cleaned up and joined the rest of the hostel folks for a wonderful dinner hosted by the family that runs the hostel. By midnight I was having trouble keeping my eyes open and called it a night.

Christmas day was rainy and crappy so we mostly read and napped the day away. We had treated ourselves to massages the day before as our gifts so it was a lazy holiday. Thankfully we were in a cabin that was cozy and had a kitchen so it was a very comfortable stay, too bad the beds were as hard as a slab of wood. After a few days in El Bolson we were on our way back to Chile. We cruised by bus back to Bariloche and then to Puerto Montt, Chile to start our next stay.