Bariloche and goodbye Patagonia.

After a few days in El Bolson we took a bus a couple of hours north to Bariloche which is a small city on the shore of a beautiful lake.
It was nice to spend a few days relaxing and walking around shops having empanadas for lunch and drinking coffee frappes at cafes. Stayed at a nice hostel with a crazy woman on the front desk. You could hear her mad laugh two flights up in our room!
Sarah wasn't in the mood for walking so she stayed at the hostel one day while I walked to the top of Cerro Otto, a hill a few kilometres from town with a fantastic view over the lake. Our 10 day hike must have had an effect on me as I didn't think twice about walking almost 20km to the top of the ridge and back to town. Only took me 4 hours.

You might have noticed that the blog updates have tailed off a bit. Possibly the marathon one for Torres Del Paine wore me out but also a likely reason is we have been a little disapointed with Argentinian Patagonia.
Patagonia is the whole of the bottom pointy bit of South America, Chile and Argentina. Apart from the Western edge around the Andes mountain range it is pretty much all flat featureless barren plains. Very windy and dusty. The trip from Puerto Natales down to Ushuaia was 12 hours of mostly featureless boring scenery. Even the fabled Tierra Del Fuego, apart from the southern edge, was almost desert with only an occasional oil pump or refinery to look at from the bus window.
Getting out of Ushuaia was a repeat of the journey there, followed by another 24 hour dull trip to El Bolson. There we found some vegetation and mountains at least and after a few days in Bariloche we headed straight to Buenos Aires which was another pretty featureless trip of 21 hours.
Also adding to our malaise about Argentina is the people. We have dealt with plenty of unfriendly and unhelpful 'service' staff on our travels but the locals here seem to have stepped it up a notch. And there are a couple of nasty habits that are quite prevalent as well.
Smoking. Almost everybody smokes. It's like Australia in the '80s when there were no health concerns and people were free to smoke wherever they wanted like in dining rooms and hospitals. A couple of the hostels we stayed at had smoking downstairs in the dining area and the whole place was full of smoke. You are trying to cook or eat and people are chain-smoking next to you. Nice....
The other unpleasant habit is an obsession with Mate. This is a tea made with a plant called yerba. (Not Coca leaves like in Bolivia.) The unpleasant aspects of it is the unhygenic paraphanalia and addictive behaviour that accompanies it. They drink it out of little gourd mugs with a metal straw with a sieve on the end. The mug has leaves put in and gets topped up with hot water from a thermos that they carry everywhere.
I will admit that I have a mild caffeine addiction. I like coffee and usually have one most mornings and may get a headache if I go a whole day without. But I don't drink coffee continuously for the entire day every day! That's what these yerba drinkers do! On long bus trips at every stop a legion of thermos weilding Argentinias run around trying to find somewhere to fill up their thermos with hot water. Most service stations actually have a coin-operated hot water bowser outside for this purpose! At the bus stations they just rudely push to the front of the line of people queuing for coffee (me) to get their thermos filled. And where do you think they empty their mugs of used yerba leaves? Wherever they feel like of course!