The next morning we got up early to catch the bus down to San Carlos de Bariloche, or simply Bariloche as it is generally referred to. It is known as the gateway to Patagonia and is a major holiday destination for Argentinians and foreigners alike - in particular Brazilians hence its nickname Brasiloche. It is Argentina's top ski resort.

Due to the time we had spent in Pucón and San Martin we scheduled only one night in Bariloche, much to the good humoured chagrin of our hostel host. Fair enough, there is an enormous amount to do in the area. With one afternoon only he advised we get a bus out to a peninsula and hire a couple of bikes to see the landscape. However first on the agenda was getting hold of tickets for a full day boat tour over to Puerto Varas in Chile the next day. Helpfully, the tour office we had been emailing closed slightly early for the afternoon and another we tried said that the next day was sold out. Not good news and so we had to scrap biking in order to ensure we were back in town for when our tour office reopened that evening.

Now, the town itself is not very pretty at all. Actually, it's a bit of a dump. However on catching a bus out to the peninsula to go for a short walk, the reason for the area's popularity became clear. The coastline is beautiful and lined with hotels and private homes ranging from nice to 5 star luxury. The crème de la crème is the Hotel Llao Llao, apparently Argentina's most famous hotel although we'd never heard of it. Try naming a hotel in Argentina? Anyway, they wouldn't even let us in for a drink at the bar, apparently due to a wedding but we weren't convinced! Tsk.

Amazingly the walk we were looking for was actually signposted and so we had a very pleasant stroll through the forest to a small lake backdropped (a word?) by snow capped mountains. Very similar to the English Lake District :)

We got back to town in time to convince the tour office to sell us tickets for the following day despite first claiming it was sold out. A disgruntled Fabrice will not be argued with! This was not before our first encounter with the 'grey' market for USD. The other agency we had stopped by earlier had cruise tickets for the Tuesday at USD 40 less than the quoted price. We figured USD 80 was worth delaying our departure for and went to buy the tickets. It was only then that they told us this was the cash only price - basically they take the dollars and sell them on the grey market at a very favourable exchange rate, thus being then able to pay the cruise company the full peso rate. Unfortunately we didn't have any dollars on us and so couldn't benefit from this. A few travellers have mentioned the ability to make a decent return on selling dollars in Argentina, something we may investigate when we got back later on the trip.

So all set, we returned to the hostel via Carrefour for dinner where we got chatting to yet another French couple. France must be empty, that's all I can say.