What a difference a day makes!

You can feel such a hypocrite. Yesterday I was being negative about the sandwiches provided on our coach here and today Ana produces something similar for lunch!

We've caught the No. 20 bus to Llao Llao Hotel 26 km. out of Bariloche and are well into our walk when the desire to eat comes back again. Well, the bread rolls have been knocking around for a couple of days and the sliced cheese likewise and never in a fridge! Ok, the bread falls apart a bit, but mostly it can be held in some kind of unity with the cheese long enough to be ingested with reasonable pleasure.

The thing is, it's been raining most of the day and we'll take anything to keep us going.

The bus drops us at the hotel and it is supposed to be the best place in Argentina to get your head down. Great views and they don't let the riff-raff in; we didn't even try after a couple of Americans were sent packing!

Down the hill, find the right path and up to the top to view the fjord-like lakes and snow-capped mountaintops. Fantastic, even in the pouring rain.

And guess what? Well you Phillistines who don't get the orchid thing can go and visit another site for a minute! The icing on the cake were these amazing yellow orchids. Richard wasn't expecting to find any Orchidacae, but there they were. Compared to the New Zealand ones these are giants! About three feet high, with large yellow, orange, red and green flowers. The flowers were as big as the whole orchid plants we'd seen in NZ!

No new photos yet but we're off to Buenos Aires tomorrow, a 25 hour coach trip this time! And we plan to stay there for a week to catch up with various bits of admin.

So if you don't like orchids don't look at the "Argentinian Orchids" album.

At least Richard didn't find any in Chile!!

The hostel we're staying in is called Marco Polo Inn. Believe it or not, this is the first place we've stayed in since January with working radiators in the rooms. And we're so grateful. Yesterday it seemed rather too hot, but today, after a very wet walk in Patagonia we couldn't wait to get back and dry off and get warm.

Great conversations over the free dinner as well.

At breakfast we spoke to a couple from Cambridge who had booked their trip with the same person at STA in Cambridge!!