Anyone walking down Mitre Street in Bariloche could be forgiven for thinking that you visited the town in order to eat chocolate. Maybe some people do, but a better reason is to admire the views from the neighboring mountains. A lot of sites claim that National Geographic rated the view from Cerro Campanario as one of the ten best in the world. I can’t find any verification for that on the National Geographic web site, but having seen the view I agree it’s possible.
I reached the top of Cerro Campanario, some thousand feet above the town, the old fashioned way. I hiked up. Most people rode the chair lift, but not only was I in need of exercise, I hate those things. The older I get, the worse my fear of heights becomes. Unfortunately, the path turned out to both very steep in places, and also covered in ash from the 2011 eruption of Volcan Puyehue, and without a hiking stick I had doubts about my ability to hike back down.
I spent a lot of quality time at the top, partly outside, and partly eating lunch in the cafeteria, with a marvelous view. But I couldn’t stay there forever. I eventually decided that the chair lift would be the lesser of the two evils, but I spent the entire seven minute ride with my eyes shut, holding on for dear life.
At that point, I should have quit while I was ahead. But there were two more mountains, still higher, Otto and Catedral. Checking with the TI, I found out that Catedral, a major ski center, wasn’t open, but I could take an enclosed ride up Otto. Big mistake. I was thinking funicular, but the only difference between the chair lift and the cable cars was that the cars were enclosed and held four. They were still suspended in mid-air. This time I rode both up and down with my eyes shut, and since Otto was a thousand feet higher than Campanario, the ride was longer. Despite including Bariloche itself, I didn’t think the views measured up, although they might be better in the morning.
Not until I sat down in Otto’s cafeteria did I realize that it rotated. It was here that I discovered licuado de frambuesa, a sort of raspberry smoothie. I had mine made with water rather than milk, and indulged in them several days running (making up for not enough veggies), until the acid started affecting me.
My other excursion from Bariloche, a boat ride to a forest and to Isla Victoria was less successful, being mass tourism of the worst kind. Besides, I’d already seen a lot of the lake. Once again, all the announcements on the boat, aside from the safety briefing, were in Spanish, but one young guide did take the double handful of English speakers on our own guided walks. I was intrigued to learn that while most conifers are hermaphrodites, monkey puzzle trees are either female (large bushy cones), or male (very small cones). The guide thought the trees, Araucaria araucana, were called monkey trees, but I’ve always known them as monkey puzzle trees. They are much more impressive in their native habitat than in English gardens.
There’s not a lot to see in Bariloche itself, aside from the self-consciously Alpine buildings round the main square. These date from the 1930s, when tourism was replacing agriculture as the foundation of the economy. The town was established in the 1890s, with a number of Austrian and German settlers, which may explain why some Nazi war criminals found sanctuary there. (Although I refuse to believe the fantasy that they included Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.) I was not actually aware of this history when I planned to visit Bariloche, and have now found this article of interest: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3335016/Nazis-Argentine-village-hide-out-pulls-in-tourists.html
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