Sunday 10 November 2013

6/112013 and 7/11/2013 rest days in San Carlos de Bariloche

We had only intended to have one rest day but the weather turned on us  and we suddenly had to put up with rain and cold conditions, which after three months of virtually no rain came as a shock. Still there were a lot of plans to be made with regards to the route to be taken and how. We eventually decided to do the three lakes ferry crossing through a small pass into Chile. This is known to be very beautiful but depends on good views and hence good weather.Waiting a couple of days would allow us to hopefully move into a period of better weather, although just about everyone we spoke forewarned us that the Chiloe peninsula where we were heading  was beautiful but inevitably very wet.
We spent the time route planning and buying a rucksack and hiking shoes for Torres Paine. In Argentina using a credit card is rarely possible and when it is it is usually 15-25% more than the cash price and getting sufficient cash out of the ATMs is not easy so it would take two days at least to get sufficient cash to buy what we wanted. Also we waned to sit out the bad weather. It had suddenly turned cold and wet.
After the two rest days we were going to set off for Llao Llao the following day where the ferry would leave. Llao Llao is notoriously expensive and up market and all though plenty of hotels it didn't  seem have anything as lowly as a food shop and probably no camping
Another difficulty to be overcome was the fact that you can't take much in the way of food into Chile and if they catch you the fines are quite substantial, on the other hand once we passed the Chilean border it would be several hours before we would encounter any shops to buy new supplies. What to do?
Once again we had to go through the  wet back street dealing process to change our remaining dollars into Chilean pesos and prepared for a short stage tomorrow.

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