December 26, 2010

At last the weather gods seemed to have ruled that we had paid back enough to compensate for the great weather we had experienced earlier during the voyage. In the morning the sky was virtually cloud-free and we could sense that it was going to be a very hot day.

Jorge and Carmen suggested that we should drive down to a part of the Nahuel Huapi national park south of Bariloche at the foot of an ancient volcano called Tronador. Nahuel Huapi is a large national park (Argentina´s first, atually) covering over 7000 square kilometers (2700 square miles). Both the city of Bariloche and Villa La Angostura are inside the national park. The Tronador volcano is in both Chile and Argentina and hosts no less than 8 glaciers. Getting there meant a drive of over 2 hours.

The kids had not remembered to recharge their iPods, so it was time for me, for the first time during the voyage, to get out my batmobile car charging station. I have a socket doubler and two double iPhone/iPod chargers, giving me four 2.5W charging points on a single 12V outlet. I also have two single point iPad 10W chargers when I need those. In addition I have external batteries with USB outputs of their own. Here I am charging 2 batteries, each in turn charging an iPod. In addition I am directly charging an IPod and an iPhone. All from one 12V socket. Cool, eh?

Have you ever though about the fact that the only standardized globally available power socket is actually originally a car cigarette lighter?

Driving the same way we came from the airport we could now see the road between Villa La Angostura and Bariloche in daylight. Wow! The views were many and breathtaking. What a beautiful place this is:

Bariloche in the background:

The last hour or so was on a gravel road.  We drove through a forest which evidently must have been destroyed by forest fire some time ago. The remaining white tree corpses created an artificial looking white forest, right out of a fantasy movie. The dust from Jorge and Carmen´s car was in the air all the time. On arrival the rental car was full of stone powder.

I take back all the bad things I said about the dirt road to Anitapolis in Brasil. That road was simply full of holes. This road, in addition, was riddled with rocks often the size of the fist of a grown man. We were both shaken and stirred.

It was worth it though, on arrival we had reached lake Hess

and the river flowing out of it. We first stopped on the bridge crossing the river to breathe in the great view and tranquility of this place:

then we hiked along the river to see a waterfall. Ready to go:

We were very impressed by the state of the path along the river. It was like walking on a wooden floor all the way. Shoes were definitely better treated than tires in this national park:

Being partially fed by glacier water the river had a magnificent green/blue color. Here is the top of the waterfall:

As seen from the other side:

There was also a side waterfall:

We had our lunch at a viewing platform with a nice view of the waterfalls and the valley:

Nice lunch view:

Gazing out and taking in the view was soothing for the soul. What a beautiful place.

We returned to the car and drove a short while before we hiked to another lake. I found some Calafate bushes, a local wild berry bush:

15 years ago I collected some berries from a calafate bush down in Rio Gallegos in Argentina. I brought the seeds back home. At the time my main hobby was office gardening. I have to admit I spent a lot of time in the office back then, and since I also love plants, this was the perfect hobby for me. I preferred starting with a seed and then nurture and see the plant through it´s birth and growth into maturity. I had many different kinds of plants, mostly edible, in my office during the last half of the nineties. After 2000 I started traveling so much in my work that office gardening was no longer practically feasible. I loved it when I could get seeds myself from fruits or vegetables. I successfully grew a very large bell pepper plant, with beautiful bell peppers, from a store bought pepper and also had two kiwi plants (with seeds from regular bought kiwis) which covererd a large window with their big leaves.

It was a big momenet when I returned from South America with seeds from the calafate bush and tried to germinate them. They turned out to be very difficult to germinate and I tried in vain for several weeks. After a weekend I came in to work and to my pleasure and pride I could see that two of the seeds I had planted had finally germinated. I was ecstatic and treated them like my newborn babies over the next days. I thought they looked very much like radish seedlings, but also knew from experience that seedlings of very different plants can look very much alike. It was only after the seedlings started developing a red stem that I suspected something fishy was going on. My beloved work colleagues had put radish seeds in my box with calafate seeds! I was devastated and still have a hard time talking about it.

On a different occasion one of them was responsible for my plants while I was away for a few days. When I came back the new seedlings of several different types of plants were completely submerged in too much water and no longer visible. I was sure he had drowned them and almost had a heart attack. He had taken the pain of rebuilding the seedling box all the way down to moving my little signs made with post-its and unbended paper clips. When he saw my reaction he quickly produced the original pot with all seedlings intact.

I actually managed to make two calafate seeds germinate later on. The way the seedlings developed was fascinating. The bush only grows in harsh mountain conditions and it showed. It would first make one tiny leaf, white without chlorophyl. Then the leaf would fill with green before the plant carefully created another single leaf. Clearly an evolutionary strategy for an environment where it pays off to invest as little as possible at a time, in case a storm or cold spell comes and wipes out some of your leaves. Unfortunately I later managed to kill the seedlings myself by leaving the relatively young plants, before having moved them to a larger pot, exposed to the sun without water over a weekend. I grieved them for a very long time and never managed to get any of the remaining seeds to germinate.

Ooops, sorry.

We stopped by the park ranger´s cabin for a chat

Ranger to the right:

Several trees, acting like one:

We now got a great view of the Tronador and its glaciers:

At 3491 meters (11453 feet) the Tronador is more than 1000 meters (3300 feet) higher than any of the other mountains in this part of the Andes.

The kids went for a swim in the quite chilly water:

while the adults drank some mate:

On our way back we paused in a field of flowers:

Loves me, loves me not…

We had company:

Iseline ran around and at one point shouted, as only a kid can: “I just love flowers!”

Everyone was tired in the end:

A warning if you ever plan to go to this part of the national park. The only road in and out is one-way until 6pm, meaning that you cannot get out again until after 6pm. We were unaware of this and tried to go home earlier and were stopped at a police check-point and asked to go back. In fact, signs marked “police check-point” can be seen very often here, but mostly there is no one present.

On our way home we stopped to buy and eat some home baked bread with pieces of fat with small lumps of meat inside. Real peasant food, and very welcomed after a great day in the open:

We stopped at yet another beautiful lake

where Isleline made a hole in the water:

and we saw this cool spider holding its egg sack (sorry Gwen, couldn´t resist):

There were nice views on the way back also:

Jorge suggested in the moring that we shoud drop by the airport during the day to ask if there was news about our luggage. My initial reaction was that there was no point, luggage claim did not answer the phone anyway. He countered by saying that there were flights on Sundays too. He was right. On the way home we stopped at the airport. I had as much hope as a frog watcher in the gobi desert when we went over to the LAN office. Nope, no news about out luggage. We went upstairs to the Aerolina Argentinas office, just so we could tell the other ones that we had tried everything.

Once Jorge explained why we were there I had turned off my Spanish and just waited for the conversation to finish. Jorge looked at me and said: “I think they are here” I checked the audio memory of the last 15 seconds in my brain and realize the woman had asked us if we were looking for 5 backpacks. She went into the back room and, holy mackerel, came back with all our luggage. I just couldn´t believe it. GOL had even wrapped each backpack in plastic to protect them. When I asked when they had arrived she said that she didn´t know, but probably yesterday morning. They had not bothered to call the 3 phone numbers they had by now, and she offered no explanation as to why. I was in no mood to quarrel and gladly signed the luggage release papers.

It felt like a second Christmas:

Everything was there and in good shape and order, possibly with the exception of Helene´s gluten-free bread which was a bit dry and squashed flat. We could finally give our hosts their original Christmas presents: Traditional Norwegian mittens:

Tomorrow we will hike again.

See you around, folks!

Eirik

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