Lake Guiterrez trek

After our arrival in Bariloche and spending the night on the city beach in our mini tent, we needed some serious relaxing time.  I tell you it was a little stressful-worrisome-scary-cooold setting up our tent at midnight on some public beach where we were probably not allowed to camp in the first place... BUT we made it through the night, though the next morning we awoke and it was raining and we noticed a private beach sign do not enter (in espanol of course) we packed up camp faster then you could imagine.  We still werent sure at this point where we were headed, well we had some idea from a travellers blog we had previously, speaking of lake guiterrez! So.. we started walking and walking and walking, then we found cafe pueblo where we sat for probably an hour and a hour... flipping Mike Greens lucky coin he gave us trying to decide whether we should stay in Bariloche or head north to warmer weather.  Well, greeners coin said head north, but we questioned the coins ruling over our travels and ultimately decided to stay in Bariloche. 

         The next several hours were spent searching for 1) el supermercado 2) msr gas refill tank 3) numero 50 bus terminal y 4) a store with pots and possibly pans.  Thankfully by the grace of the all mighty...we found all of them! yay, actually I lied, we didnt get our MSR gas refilled, although we did find a store with the gas tanks but for some reason or another all of them were empty...hmmm...  but anywho we caught bus 50 and rode it about 20 minutes south of Bariloche, the bus dropped us off at a dirt in the middle of nowhere, nowhere being Nahuel Huapi National Park of San Carlos de Bariloche! The road sort of did a fork and we werent quite sure exactly which of the right or left to go, so me and my wonderful sense of direction chose the lefter route... which after a 2 km hike up a dirt road, lead us to the wonderful entrance of Nahuel Huapi national park, and so our actual trek began.  The andes es muuy bonita, and reminds me so much of hiking in the great northwest minus the butt loads of bamboo, soo bizzare there was so much bamboo everywhere which I was not expecting at all.  Dominic and I did about 8 km of hiking when we came to a sign that pointed us to "Frey" which was another 6 km or "Playa Munoz" only 800 meters away! yay! so we chose playa munoz, a) because it was a beach, hence the playa and b) we looked to where the Frey would take us and it was at the snowy top of the mountain, and camping in the snow didnt sound too appealing to either of us.  The 800 meters to playa munoz felt like it took forever, and it was steep downhill leg of the trip and by this time my legs were super wobbly... but we finally made it and it was oh so wonderful!! and we were the only people at this little oasis (though we didnt realize it was quite bigger then we thought).  We spent several days camping out and relaxing here, cooking our food over a campfire, we made several tasty meals mostly potatos and sausage and pasta and sausage (yes I ate argentinian sausage and it was super dank) and lots and lots of bread and cheese (side note to our parents, we have been living off bread and cheese this entire trip so were expecting mad tasty Christmas meals upon our return...heh.) Lake Guiterrez was amazing, though it seemed crazy to think that we were in the middle of the Andes mountains in Patagonia of Argentina. We spent alot of our time hiking around, collecting fire wood, building fires (mostly Dom) reading, and knitting, and it was oh so relaxing. though cold.  After several days when we figured we could go camp somewhere warmer we hit the trail yet again and headed back to Bariloche.  For some reason or another the hike back didnt take as long as it did to get to playa munoz, though the trail had become a mini river after a day of rain, and well I slipped on a mud patch and fell face first down into the massive mud puddle, mud my mouth, nose, hair, my entire foot black with mud, clothes covered in mud, and my arm somehow got caught and twisted under my bag and i couldnt move, so dom being the wonderful man that he is picked me up from my backpack.  It was quite horrible, and I hurt my foot pretty bad  (thats a prayer request for me right now!! healing in my foot so we can continue to hike and what not!! gracias!) But besides my fall we made it back to town safely otherwise.  That night we stayed at the backpackers hostel of bariloche and met-chilled with wonderful people from all over, drank some whiskey, dominic made me a yummy dinner and we hit the hay early.  At that point in time we were not to sure where we were headed next, we were thinking Santa Rosa, but Juan at the hostel referred to Santa Rosa as a "nasty littlte town" although I dont think its that little, we decided we would skip on Santa Rosa.  He did make a suggestion of Puerto Madryn on the Atlantic Coast, we did some research and it sounded wonderful, supposedly there is alot of whale watching and penguins on the beaches! ... SO here we are, we hopped on a bus that day (an over night bus) and made it to Puerto Madryn! Were hoping to do some more camping on the beach here, catch some sights of whales and maybe even run into a penguin or two!! eeek. penguins! sweet haha. anywho I suppose I should cut myself off at this point! Chao Amigos!!