Day 51 - 25 Jan.2012 - San Carlos de Bariloche

We left Futalefú in the morning and after 8 km crossed the border to Argentina again. The border controls ware all right and the border not too busy. After an hour or so we were through the two checkpoints and continued our way towards Esquel where we stopped for lunch. We read in our guide that somewhere in this region there must be an old steam train running on a really small gauge width. Patagonia used to have a network of train tracks, mainly for cargo, but nowadays only a few kilometres are used as a tourist attraction. We have asked in a kiosk where this train leaves and set off to find the train station. Regrettably, we arrived just on time to see the back of the train leaving. The woman in the local train museum told us it takes one hour for the train to reach the station 20km away from Esquel and we could easily catch up with the train on one of the two road crossings. So we went, and indeed, after some kilometres we saw the steam of the train revealing its location. When we reached the road crossing, we were by far not the only train spotters. There were about 20 cars and lorries parked at the crossing awaiting the passing of the train. The next stop, Nahuel Pan, was the end station of the train. The place is an accumulation of 5 houses or so with tourist shops for the coming passengers. During its one-hour stay the train engine was swapped to the other end of the carriages to get ready for its journey back to Esquel. We decided to wait and see the train leaving.
It was already after four in the afternoon when we continued our way to Bariloche. The weather was getting quite dusty (literally, as we were to find out later) and the “fog” in the air hid the view of the mountains.
We arrived in San Carlos de Bariloche in the evening. Our first impressions of this tourist magnet were rather mixed. A quite dense traffic and relatively random outskirts of the town was not too inviting. We drove along the waterfront some 5km out of town to get to our campsite.
In the evening we went on a quest to find a restaurant. We hoped to find something close to the camping and set off on foot. It turned out that the restaurants nearby were not to our liking or closed and we ended up walking a fair bit. Eventually we arrived at a bus stop and jumped on a bus only to find out that we could not get a ticket from the driver. However, the friendly bus driver let us go without paying and so we got our trip into town for free. In the centre we found a really nice restaurant with Beergarden. Tonight for dinner we had a really great Argentinean Steak and ”Balmoral Venison” with 1 litre of Warsteiner – a funny international mixture.