Bariloche - January 20th

One of the main attractions in Bariloche is to drive around what is called the Circuito Chico.  This is a drive along the big lake front and then loop around some other lakes, before coming back into town along the same stretch of road along the lake front.  It’s about 70km long, but a clever bike hire company has based itself at the beginning of the loop, meaning you can do it as an easy 35km cycle.  Which is what we plan to do today.

We get a local bus out to the starting point, and after a quite long briefing about what attractions are available in the area, we get our bikes and helmets and set off.  We probably haven’t gone 500 metres before we encounter our first problem, Dorota’s chain comes off.  I fix it, and then as I start off my chain comes off.  We probably should have gone back with the bikes at that point, but for some reason we continue on.  Because the tarred road is under repair, we have to go on a gravel track shortcut, but it turns out this road is full of dogs which appear quite viscous as they chase us.  It is not helped by the fact that the chain problems are really gear problems which means that getting the right gear to speed away from the dogs uphill is not easy.

After those two problems the rest of the day goes quite well.  We lunch on a little beach on the main lake (which like the one at Calafate is massive) and we go for a walk to a hidden lake (hidden from the main road, but well signposted so actually it is crowded), and we see all the scenic views over the lakes.  We also go to what is called the Swiss Colony, a little village in the mountains.  Here we have what might well be the best ice creams either of us have ever had.  They weren’t that cheap, but the quality of the ice cream, especially Dorota’s deep chocolate and my forest fruits, was amazing.

After that we head back to return the bikes.  Our legs actually suffered today, even though in comparison to Vietnam it was short and not too steep.  I think it might be because we didn’t eat dinner last night.  We make up for it with a big Italian dinner tonight.