Picture 4: Beach in San Martin at the end of Lake Lacar.
Picture 3: Chilean border at Hua Hum.
Picture 1: Map showing the three towns
Picture 2: Volcan LaninA TRIP TO UPPER PATAGONIA & OTHER EVENTS
January 2006
[n.b. The pictures are numbered correctly, but I can't seem to get them in numerical order! Perhaps next time. ]
A wonderful trip to San Martín de los Andes earlier this month, in addition to my first experience of an Argentine summer, provides new fodder.
We traveled to San Martín in the most economical and comfortable manner, on one of the long-haul Mercedes-Benz buses run by Via Bariloche, the most popular bus line serving that part of Patagonia. It’s a 1000+ mile trip and takes about 18-20 hours, depending on traffic. This sounds intimidating until you settle into one of the comfy leather seats in the all first-class bus, enjoying 160-degree reclining seat back, with leg rests that fold down from the seat in front. We had been advised to try for the middle of the bus on the second level (they’re two-story buses!), and I almost fell asleep before we got out of downtown Buenos Aires. All the buses leave from the new, modern, and efficient Retiro bus station, about two blocks from the Retiro train terminals. En route you are served by on-board stewards, receive a snack, dinner, and breakfast. Movies are shown on the built-in DVD system, which also offers music channels. The seats are at least as large and comfortable as first-class seats on an airplane. But the cost is much less – it’s US $50 round-trip to San Martín, whereas the airplane, which gets there in about three hours, costs $300. When we arrived, we had a rental car arranged through Hertz/Annie Millet, which had also been recommended owing to their extensive service network and reliability. More expensive than the local shops, but flawless in execution. Our car was a 2005 Volkswagen Gol with 1.4 liter engine, a/c, and radio/CD player, with only about 10,000 kilometers (6200 miles) on it. It was fast and fun to drive.
San Martín is one of three well-known mountain resort towns in northwestern Patagonia, nestled in the foothills of the Andes about 1000 miles southwest of Buenos Aires. Patagonia itself can rightly be described as practically the entire southern third of this enormous country (8th largest in the world, right after India), and its area includes both Andean highlands and rugged South Atlantic shoreline. It is vastly unpopulated and you can actually drive for 15 or 20 minutes in the middle of a beautiful summer’s day without seeing another vehicle or even a cow or horse.
The other two towns in this region are Villa la Angostura and San Carlos de Bariloche. The map (picture 1 above) shows their arrangement north to south, with Chile in light gray on the left.
The distance from San Martín to Bariloche is about 125 miles via Villa Angostura, but the line you see between SM and VA, shown in orange, is a dirt road (called a camino ripio, where ripio means rubble, an apt description) and travel on such roads, while scenic, can also be bone-jarring. It is possible to drive to VA on good asphalt roads, but instead of being a 125 kilometer trip it becomes a 300 kilometer one. We did it both ways, and I guess I’ll take the rubble, but I’m glad it wasn’t in my own car!
For those of you familiar with the Hampton towns of eastern Long Island, the three towns here could be characterized in terms of their personalities, which would roughly equate Bariloche with Southampton; Villa Angostura with East Hampton; and San Martín with Amagansett. Of course I have no idea if that’s of any use! Bariloche is by far the largest of the towns – a city, really – and has the most popular ski areas, entertainment venues, and remarkably fancy homes and apartment buildings. Angostura is the rich hideaway of the three, with a small business/entertainment district and large estates and resort hotels scattered around it. In just driving through Angostura you’d have no idea of the luxury surrounding it, and people there seem to like it that way.
Of the three, San Martín de los Andes is most appealing to me, partly because it’s a much lower-intensity place. It’s nicely laid out at the East end of Lake Làcar, surrounded on three sides by hills and mountains, and is perhaps 15 blocks by 10 blocks in size. There are no stoplights; and it’s very easy to get everywhere on foot. There is one modest movie theater but several parks and town squares where entertainment occurs nightly during the summer season – we heard a lively chamber music concert performed by students and teachers from the Bariloche summer music school one evening that reminded me of long-ago Aspen outdoor classical concerts, where everyone comes with their kids and dogs, eating ice cream or having a cocktail and listening to classical music under the stars – having been sure to have brought along a sweater.
Lodging is plentiful and cheap, as they say. We had half of a two-story A-frame cabin that was actually a fully furnished one-bedroom apartment so we could cook in when we wished. The back windows opened onto the stream that runs through the town and we went to sleep every night to the pleasant sound of rushing waters. And it cost about US35 a night.
There are vast numbers of these cabin/apartment places throughout San Martín, and you can find places ranging from rustic to serious luxury, all pleasantly spread out through the town and up the hillsides.
We were lucky to be able to rent a car for a week (as with cabins, advance planning is required), and we lucked out and got a nearly-new VW coupe that was perfect for sightseeing and handling the roads. We had 2000 free kilometers but only managed to use about 1500 of them as I had just about had it with washboards and potholes! But in our travels we got south to the other two resort towns; west to the Chilean border at Hua Hum, where there sits a forlorn-looking border crossing station high in the Andes; and the favorite trip, north to the extinct volcano called Lanín, about 12,000 feet high, where I took my best picture (#2 above). That’s Lanin across the lake – about 30 miles from where the picture was taken. It’s a very popular trekking and climbing area, and for mountain climbers the peak is a challenge; just last week an experienced Australian climber died after falling into a crevasse. We stopped only at the visitor center near the base of Lanin and gazed at it up through the trees and rocks; if you plan to climb you have to sign in with the park ranger’s office. Unfortunately, cell phones don’t work there, so unless you have a satellite phone, you’re just “out there” as in the old days.
Picture 3: This is the border at Hua Hum. It’s about 60 miles from San Martin, and when you cross the border, you have another 50 miles or so to the nearest town (and gas station). The picture strikes me as grim, but it was actually a pleasant, if cool, day. There didn't seem to be any other people around -- even in the customs sheds, and we were thinking it was pretty lonely up there. We turned around the car around and were making our way back down the road when we almost ran into a huge group of high school kids backpacking their way to Chile!
Of all the good eating and drinking we did, nothing was more enjoyable than what is probably the best restaurant in San Martin, called Avataras, and yes, the name is related to avatars and meanings they convey. The operation is owned and run by a group of 15 people, young, old, men and women, who have chosen to leave city life in BsAs and move to the mountains. The food is traditional and excellent, with smatterings of Asian and wildlife offerings. We liked it so much we went twice and both times were superb – and, of course, inexpensive. They also have a pub attached, where we enjoyed talking to other tourists and to the owners.
On both of the quite warm days – temps in the high 80s – we went to the town beach on Lake Lácar (picture 4). The water is cold but not impossible, and soon after I took this shot the beach filled up with families enjoying the day. We left to pick up some lunch returned for more. The one jarring note for me was the presence nearby of a business-type American guy probably in his 30s who had a satellite phone and was conducting business from the sand, and not discreetly. It was sort of weird listening to this guy blather away as if he were in Manhattan, while his girlfriend read a magazine looking bored. I’m sure his business is important and the phone is useful since regular cell phones don’t work well in San Martin, but in retrospect we should have moved down the beach – but didn’t because we kept thinking the next call would be his last! Silly us. He was still on the phone when we left an hour later.
This was a bit strange to me, since one of the pleasant things about living here is that I very seldom hear American English anywhere in my neighborhood, at restaurants, or on the trains and buses. And the times I have overheard Americans they were usually speaking louder than necessary and with evident disregard of others, which for some reason I found bothersome. It’s as if they are unaware of anything outside their own conversation and its vapidity. Argentines tend to be unfailingly polite when standing on line or in a restaurant or anywhere else, and I confess that some American behavior I’ve seen has made me think of the Ugly American syndrome of Europe in years past. I guess it’s still alive.
One of the interesting facts of life here is the presence of street dogs nearly everywhere. They come in all shapes and sizes and degrees of cleanliness, but the amazing thing to me is that they are friendly, completely tolerated, and can sleep safely wherever they feel like it – at a street corner, in front of shops, in parks and playgrounds, just about anywhere except the middle of the street. They are completely and utterly socialized and harmless to pedestrians, and people in the street (frequently including me) often stop to pet them and talk to them. It’s just amazing. The three or four that roam my immediate neighborhood here in Martinez are favorites. It’s said that if you take one of them home and clean him up and get him looked after by a vet, he (or she) will make the best pet you’ve ever had, and I don’t doubt it. They seldom run in packs and seem free and happy as they walk or trot down the street. People feed them and shop owners leave water in pans outside when it’s hot. I was in a clothing store in San Fernando recently on a very hot afternoon, and a street dog followed a customer into the store, went to a corner, and lay down to enjoy the air-conditioning. No one did anything, and finally one of the sales clerks brought out a bowl of water for the dog! She was still there when I left, but later I saw her trotting down a side street.
Driving in Argentina is really not at all difficult, at least for me, and while there are some rather reckless drivers, by and large it is not nearly as chaotic as is often represented in tourism articles. If you can drive in cities like Washington, New York, or Boston you won’t have any trouble driving here. Driving in the countryside, however, requires special attention to the gas gauge, because there are virtually no service stations outside of towns and cities. On our drive to Bariloche and Villa Angostura, there was one stretch of more than 70 miles during which there were no stations, no restaurants, no motels, no phones, no nothin’, as they say. And very few cars, buses, or trucks, to boot. And this on a weekday in high summer travel/vacation season. It’s like the American West was when I was growing up in Arizona (but isn’t any longer), and produces a degree of alertness and respect that I had forgotten. The scenery itself changes every 20 or 30 miles and at some point you feel like saying, “Oh, no. Not another spectacular vista.” I stopped taking pictures or we would never have completed our travels! We passed places where we could see big estancias in the distance – large farming or husbandry operations featuring a huge main house and outlying buildings, often several miles from the highway, and almost always surrounded by towering poplar and aspen that serve as wind-blocks for the immediate area. In fact, as far as I could tell on the bus trip, such groups of trees are almost always the sign of an estancia or smaller farming/ranching operation. The wind is not ceaseless, but nearly so, and is a big part of Patagonian life.
Argentina has one of the largest railroad networks in South America, built mostly by the British and French, and long ago given over solely to freight operations as the faster huge buses came into service. In addition, a long-ago President of Argentina, Julio Argentine Roca (whose picture is on the 100-peso note), created the first serious highway networks throughout the country and frequently ordered them laid out parallel to existing train right-of-ways, thus assuring the eventual demise of passenger service. But for many years there were more railroads than highways and passenger service was remarkably sophisticated. The only trains that remain in the country today are commuter trains near the big cities and the occasional touristic train such as the “Train to the Clouds” in the northern Andes. There apparently is actually a once-a-week train from Buenos Aires to Santiago, but I have been unable to discover any information about it and I imagine it’s pretty grim going.
Air travel internally is pretty much monopolized by Aerolineas Argentina and its wholly-owned sub, Austral. They fly a huge fleet of Boeing 737s (like Southwest Airlines in the US) and cover this huge country very well. The prices, owing to their dominance, are higher than the US and there are seldom special fares or discounts, so the Big Buses are really the only alternative for those who choose not to pay big bucks to fly. For travel to Uruguay, for example, most people take either the large ships or smaller catamarans to Montevideo, and then hop a bus from there to the beach resorts or other places. And as mentioned, the buses are so comfortable I wouldn’t mind riding them anywhere.
In any event, I can assure you this is a wonderful place to visit, and while inflation is occurring, it’s not at a level to change the basic inexpensive nature of the place. Also, the government by design is keeping the peso-dollar exchange rate at about 3:1 (while it would probably be more like 2.5:1 if allowed to float), so your money really does go further. [n.b. As of this editing, the peso is at about 3.05 to the dollar and has been that way since October.]
A wonderful trip to San Martín de los Andes earlier this month, in addition to my first experience of an Argentine summer, provides new fodder.
We traveled to San Martín in the most economical and comfortable manner, on one of the long-haul Mercedes-Benz buses run by Via Bariloche, the most popular bus line serving that part of Patagonia. It’s a 1000+ mile trip and takes about 18-20 hours, depending on traffic. This sounds intimidating until you settle into one of the comfy leather seats in the all first-class bus, enjoying 160-degree reclining seat back, with leg rests that fold down from the seat in front. We had been advised to try for the middle of the bus on the second level (they’re two-story buses!), and I almost fell asleep before we got out of downtown Buenos Aires. All the buses leave from the new, modern, and efficient Retiro bus station, about two blocks from the Retiro train terminals. En route you are served by on-board stewards, receive a snack, dinner, and breakfast. Movies are shown on the built-in DVD system, which also offers music channels. The seats are at least as large and comfortable as first-class seats on an airplane. But the cost is much less – it’s US $50 round-trip to San Martín, whereas the airplane, which gets there in about three hours, costs $300. When we arrived, we had a rental car arranged through Hertz/Annie Millet, which had also been recommended owing to their extensive service network and reliability. More expensive than the local shops, but flawless in execution. Our car was a 2005 Volkswagen Gol with 1.4 liter engine, a/c, and radio/CD player, with only about 10,000 kilometers (6200 miles) on it. It was fast and fun to drive.
San Martín is one of three well-known mountain resort towns in northwestern Patagonia, nestled in the foothills of the Andes about 1000 miles southwest of Buenos Aires. Patagonia itself can rightly be described as practically the entire southern third of this enormous country (8th largest in the world, right after India), and its area includes both Andean highlands and rugged South Atlantic shoreline. It is vastly unpopulated and you can actually drive for 15 or 20 minutes in the middle of a beautiful summer’s day without seeing another vehicle or even a cow or horse.
The other two towns in this region are Villa la Angostura and San Carlos de Bariloche. The map (picture 1 above) shows their arrangement north to south, with Chile in light gray on the left.
The distance from San Martín to Bariloche is about 125 miles via Villa Angostura, but the line you see between SM and VA, shown in orange, is a dirt road (called a camino ripio, where ripio means rubble, an apt description) and travel on such roads, while scenic, can also be bone-jarring. It is possible to drive to VA on good asphalt roads, but instead of being a 125 kilometer trip it becomes a 300 kilometer one. We did it both ways, and I guess I’ll take the rubble, but I’m glad it wasn’t in my own car!
For those of you familiar with the Hampton towns of eastern Long Island, the three towns here could be characterized in terms of their personalities, which would roughly equate Bariloche with Southampton; Villa Angostura with East Hampton; and San Martín with Amagansett. Of course I have no idea if that’s of any use! Bariloche is by far the largest of the towns – a city, really – and has the most popular ski areas, entertainment venues, and remarkably fancy homes and apartment buildings. Angostura is the rich hideaway of the three, with a small business/entertainment district and large estates and resort hotels scattered around it. In just driving through Angostura you’d have no idea of the luxury surrounding it, and people there seem to like it that way.
Of the three, San Martín de los Andes is most appealing to me, partly because it’s a much lower-intensity place. It’s nicely laid out at the East end of Lake Làcar, surrounded on three sides by hills and mountains, and is perhaps 15 blocks by 10 blocks in size. There are no stoplights; and it’s very easy to get everywhere on foot. There is one modest movie theater but several parks and town squares where entertainment occurs nightly during the summer season – we heard a lively chamber music concert performed by students and teachers from the Bariloche summer music school one evening that reminded me of long-ago Aspen outdoor classical concerts, where everyone comes with their kids and dogs, eating ice cream or having a cocktail and listening to classical music under the stars – having been sure to have brought along a sweater.
Lodging is plentiful and cheap, as they say. We had half of a two-story A-frame cabin that was actually a fully furnished one-bedroom apartment so we could cook in when we wished. The back windows opened onto the stream that runs through the town and we went to sleep every night to the pleasant sound of rushing waters. And it cost about US35 a night.
There are vast numbers of these cabin/apartment places throughout San Martín, and you can find places ranging from rustic to serious luxury, all pleasantly spread out through the town and up the hillsides.
We were lucky to be able to rent a car for a week (as with cabins, advance planning is required), and we lucked out and got a nearly-new VW coupe that was perfect for sightseeing and handling the roads. We had 2000 free kilometers but only managed to use about 1500 of them as I had just about had it with washboards and potholes! But in our travels we got south to the other two resort towns; west to the Chilean border at Hua Hum, where there sits a forlorn-looking border crossing station high in the Andes; and the favorite trip, north to the extinct volcano called Lanín, about 12,000 feet high, where I took my best picture (#2 above). That’s Lanin across the lake – about 30 miles from where the picture was taken. It’s a very popular trekking and climbing area, and for mountain climbers the peak is a challenge; just last week an experienced Australian climber died after falling into a crevasse. We stopped only at the visitor center near the base of Lanin and gazed at it up through the trees and rocks; if you plan to climb you have to sign in with the park ranger’s office. Unfortunately, cell phones don’t work there, so unless you have a satellite phone, you’re just “out there” as in the old days.
Picture 3: This is the border at Hua Hum. It’s about 60 miles from San Martin, and when you cross the border, you have another 50 miles or so to the nearest town (and gas station). The picture strikes me as grim, but it was actually a pleasant, if cool, day. There didn't seem to be any other people around -- even in the customs sheds, and we were thinking it was pretty lonely up there. We turned around the car around and were making our way back down the road when we almost ran into a huge group of high school kids backpacking their way to Chile!
Of all the good eating and drinking we did, nothing was more enjoyable than what is probably the best restaurant in San Martin, called Avataras, and yes, the name is related to avatars and meanings they convey. The operation is owned and run by a group of 15 people, young, old, men and women, who have chosen to leave city life in BsAs and move to the mountains. The food is traditional and excellent, with smatterings of Asian and wildlife offerings. We liked it so much we went twice and both times were superb – and, of course, inexpensive. They also have a pub attached, where we enjoyed talking to other tourists and to the owners.
On both of the quite warm days – temps in the high 80s – we went to the town beach on Lake Lácar (picture 4). The water is cold but not impossible, and soon after I took this shot the beach filled up with families enjoying the day. We left to pick up some lunch returned for more. The one jarring note for me was the presence nearby of a business-type American guy probably in his 30s who had a satellite phone and was conducting business from the sand, and not discreetly. It was sort of weird listening to this guy blather away as if he were in Manhattan, while his girlfriend read a magazine looking bored. I’m sure his business is important and the phone is useful since regular cell phones don’t work well in San Martin, but in retrospect we should have moved down the beach – but didn’t because we kept thinking the next call would be his last! Silly us. He was still on the phone when we left an hour later.
This was a bit strange to me, since one of the pleasant things about living here is that I very seldom hear American English anywhere in my neighborhood, at restaurants, or on the trains and buses. And the times I have overheard Americans they were usually speaking louder than necessary and with evident disregard of others, which for some reason I found bothersome. It’s as if they are unaware of anything outside their own conversation and its vapidity. Argentines tend to be unfailingly polite when standing on line or in a restaurant or anywhere else, and I confess that some American behavior I’ve seen has made me think of the Ugly American syndrome of Europe in years past. I guess it’s still alive.
One of the interesting facts of life here is the presence of street dogs nearly everywhere. They come in all shapes and sizes and degrees of cleanliness, but the amazing thing to me is that they are friendly, completely tolerated, and can sleep safely wherever they feel like it – at a street corner, in front of shops, in parks and playgrounds, just about anywhere except the middle of the street. They are completely and utterly socialized and harmless to pedestrians, and people in the street (frequently including me) often stop to pet them and talk to them. It’s just amazing. The three or four that roam my immediate neighborhood here in Martinez are favorites. It’s said that if you take one of them home and clean him up and get him looked after by a vet, he (or she) will make the best pet you’ve ever had, and I don’t doubt it. They seldom run in packs and seem free and happy as they walk or trot down the street. People feed them and shop owners leave water in pans outside when it’s hot. I was in a clothing store in San Fernando recently on a very hot afternoon, and a street dog followed a customer into the store, went to a corner, and lay down to enjoy the air-conditioning. No one did anything, and finally one of the sales clerks brought out a bowl of water for the dog! She was still there when I left, but later I saw her trotting down a side street.
Driving in Argentina is really not at all difficult, at least for me, and while there are some rather reckless drivers, by and large it is not nearly as chaotic as is often represented in tourism articles. If you can drive in cities like Washington, New York, or Boston you won’t have any trouble driving here. Driving in the countryside, however, requires special attention to the gas gauge, because there are virtually no service stations outside of towns and cities. On our drive to Bariloche and Villa Angostura, there was one stretch of more than 70 miles during which there were no stations, no restaurants, no motels, no phones, no nothin’, as they say. And very few cars, buses, or trucks, to boot. And this on a weekday in high summer travel/vacation season. It’s like the American West was when I was growing up in Arizona (but isn’t any longer), and produces a degree of alertness and respect that I had forgotten. The scenery itself changes every 20 or 30 miles and at some point you feel like saying, “Oh, no. Not another spectacular vista.” I stopped taking pictures or we would never have completed our travels! We passed places where we could see big estancias in the distance – large farming or husbandry operations featuring a huge main house and outlying buildings, often several miles from the highway, and almost always surrounded by towering poplar and aspen that serve as wind-blocks for the immediate area. In fact, as far as I could tell on the bus trip, such groups of trees are almost always the sign of an estancia or smaller farming/ranching operation. The wind is not ceaseless, but nearly so, and is a big part of Patagonian life.
Argentina has one of the largest railroad networks in South America, built mostly by the British and French, and long ago given over solely to freight operations as the faster huge buses came into service. In addition, a long-ago President of Argentina, Julio Argentine Roca (whose picture is on the 100-peso note), created the first serious highway networks throughout the country and frequently ordered them laid out parallel to existing train right-of-ways, thus assuring the eventual demise of passenger service. But for many years there were more railroads than highways and passenger service was remarkably sophisticated. The only trains that remain in the country today are commuter trains near the big cities and the occasional touristic train such as the “Train to the Clouds” in the northern Andes. There apparently is actually a once-a-week train from Buenos Aires to Santiago, but I have been unable to discover any information about it and I imagine it’s pretty grim going.
Air travel internally is pretty much monopolized by Aerolineas Argentina and its wholly-owned sub, Austral. They fly a huge fleet of Boeing 737s (like Southwest Airlines in the US) and cover this huge country very well. The prices, owing to their dominance, are higher than the US and there are seldom special fares or discounts, so the Big Buses are really the only alternative for those who choose not to pay big bucks to fly. For travel to Uruguay, for example, most people take either the large ships or smaller catamarans to Montevideo, and then hop a bus from there to the beach resorts or other places. And as mentioned, the buses are so comfortable I wouldn’t mind riding them anywhere.
In any event, I can assure you this is a wonderful place to visit, and while inflation is occurring, it’s not at a level to change the basic inexpensive nature of the place. Also, the government by design is keeping the peso-dollar exchange rate at about 3:1 (while it would probably be more like 2.5:1 if allowed to float), so your money really does go further. [n.b. As of this editing, the peso is at about 3.05 to the dollar and has been that way since October.]
1 comments:
Whenever possible, simple is better. I try to keep things in my life as simple as possible. I include my life at home, my job and my work at our fire department.With fewer moving parts there is less that can go wrong.This can be applied to real estate. I know various people that have different levels of involvement with vacation rental . Some of these folks are stretched very thin by the work that is needed to maintain a real estate portfolio. They may own a lot real estate by other people's standards or not, that is subjective but if managing your real estate is a full time job and you don't want it to be, you probably have too much.
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