The bus ride from Chiloe to Bariloche, although long, was pretty cool. As we headed east we got closer and closer to the erupting volcano that we had seen earlier in the trip. It is right near the border of Chile and Argentina, but because of the way the wind blows pretty much all the ash ends up in Argentina! As we approached the border we drove up mountains covered in dead trees, plants with layers of ash on them, piles of ash at the sides of the road where it had been cleared, and mountains where the trees stopped at the tops and they were just.. grey.

Bariloche was not a lot better, there was still a thin layer of ash over everything and when you returned after being out you could feel ash in your hair and on your skin. We also discovered that Bariloche is incredibly difficult to find anything in, and that peoples directions are neither helpful nor useful after spending the best part of two hours looking for the bus ticket office! We also received some bad information about a walk we could do, so got on a bus to find the walk, got off the bus where we thought it should be, to be met with only the road and peoples private houses with no nice view of the lake as we'd been promised. After asking in a shop and being told there was a walk somewhere, we got back on the bus, got off again, still couldn't find the walk, and ended up making our own walk... whether or not we were sposed to walk there I don't know! Bariloche did have some pluses though, there was a beautiful clear lake, if you could find a time when the ashcloud wasn't obscuring the view! (we managed the morning that we left) and chocolate shops EVERYWHERE, selling every possible misture of chocolate, so we indulged in a bit of that!

We headed down South a few hours to El Bolson, a massively hippyish town, where people build their own houses out of wood, grow there own vegetables, make their own beer (!) and it has a market a few times a week where they sell everything under the sun that you could possibly make yourself! There were wood carved things, leather things, jewellery, hats, clothes, honey, puppets, soaps, literally anything a hippie can make with their two hands was sold there! There was also a notably good icecream parlour and some nice people who we met and ate with!

Our plan was to get the bus from ElBolson to Esquel, then stay a couple of days in Esquel and get the bus down to Los Antiguos on our way to El Calafate (it was too long a journey to go directly to El Calafate). However when we arrived in Esquel at about 9pm and asked when the next bus to Los Antiguos was they said there was one that night at 9:45 or not another for 4 days and we decided to leave straight away! All I can say about Los Antiguos is that its the dullest place ever, and we're supremely lucky that we managed to leave on Monday morning and didn't have to stay til Tuesday night as we thought we would, making it 4 days there!

It was a town of 2000 people, with virtually nothing to do, and our hostel was just a bathroom, kitchen and room with some bunkbeds, with the owners house attached, no wifi, no tv, no other people... It also had insanely long roads considering it was a tiny place with nothing there! Everything was really spread out, so to walk from anywhere to anywhere took forever, which wasn't helped by the fact that I had hurt my ankle a few days before (I think probably sprained) and it had got worse and worse as I carried on walking on it and carrying my heavy backpack, so we went to the hospital (which was actually just one examination room) and the doctor strapped it all all up and told me not to walk on it for two days, we don't actually know exactly what she said was wrong with ot as she didn't speak any english! Not walking on it would be easy enough at home, but not when you are staying in a hostel that has nothing, in a town that has nothing, so needless to say it isn't healed yet!

In our few long days in Los Antiguos we discovered that the icecream parlour was the social hub of the town, we also discovered that we had begun to recognise the woman from the restaurant in the shop, the man who drove the bus in the icecream place... The one good thing that came from Los Antiguos was our cherry alcohol. Being famous for its cherries, we set off one day for one of the 'chacras' to buy some cherries, where the woman told us it wasn't cherry season, but she had ten million bottles of homemade alcohol from every fruit under the sun, so after we had sampled them all, we left with a bottle of cherry licor, having intended on buying nice healthy fruit! Anyway once we found a way to leave we couldn't wait to get out of Los Antiguos and down to El Calafate!