Time for yet another boarder crossing! From Pucón, we took a bus to San Martín de los Andes, a small town in the Argentinian lake district. The boarder crossing is in a spectacular setting, very close to Lanín volcano.

We arrived mid-afternoon and were greeted by our very friendly host from yet another AirBnB. While we first wanted to watch the football game of Boca Juniors vs River Plate, as this got cancelled he drove us up to a nice viewpoint over the village and lake. I especially liked all the yellow bushes blooming everywhere! We also went for a little walk around town, to the beach and back.

 

Next day, the sightseeing tour with our host continued – first going up Cerro Chapelco mostly by car and the last part by foot. The landscape with all its mountains and lakes reminds me a little bit of the Salzkammergut region in Austria, where I grew up.

 

Later, we stopped at some more viewpoints, ate the most delicious empanadas and chilled a bit at a lake. All in all, we had a good time in San Martín, even though it wasn’t really spectacular. From here, we bussed it further to Bariloche.

 

In Bariloche (and surroundings) we spent a couple of very active days! Plus, we still had lots of shopping to do for our upcoming adventures such as a blanket for Mathijs etc. On our first day, we thought we’d take it easy…well, it wasn’t that easy in the end! First we took a bus to Cerro Campanario and hiked up there, which only took about 30 min. I think this is one of the best value-for-the-effort hikes I have ever done! Why? 30 min and you get this view:

 

Awesome, right!? Since it was rather short though, we went to Cerro Otto afterwards and decided to climb up by ourselves too – instead of the expensive cable car. Ouuuffff! We ended up on a very steep, sandy and slippery path – for the most part also completely unprotected from the sun. It was an exhausting climb and the view not as good as on Cerro Campanario before. Oh well, higher effort, lower value! Haha.

We did decide to hike further to Piedra de Hasburgo though – luckily, because it was a rather easy walk and we found a very nice lunch spot and some different views in the other direction.

 

But… we still had to get down afterwards! There was no way we would hike down the slippery trail from before, so luckily we found a different route that was a bit better. Maps.me, once again our savior!

On our second day, we took the bus a bit further and rented some mountain bikes to cycle a roughly 30 km circuit that is called Circuito Chico. 30km does not sound like much, but the road was barely flat, mostly up and down, up and down… Ouufff! Not easy for me, but the views were very nice and fortunately we had good bikes this time (compared to San Pedro de Atacama…).

 

After about a third of the circuit, we took a detour to climb Cerro Llao Llao – yes, we actually climbed a small mountain in addition to cycling 30 km…probably explains how broken I felt in the evening… But it was very well worth it!! The views were different to the other mountains we had climbed and it was actually very nice!

 

We then continued our cycle past some pretty viewpoints and little beaches where we had our lunch. Towards the end, we decided to stop by the Patagonia Brewery, which was a really good decision! Even if you don’t like beer, the location and views are just amazing!!

 

In the evening, I already felt a bit broken….and that was before we embarked on our 3 day hike in Nahuel Huapi national park next morning! Oops. Maybe we should have taken a rest day in between. We had some heavy hiking bags this time with all our camping gear and food for 3 days! Luckily, the first day was rather easy: We took a bus to Villa Catedral and within 3 h we were at Refugio Frey, our stay for the night. It was a rather easy hike (minus all the weight we were carrying), with some nice views along the way.

At the Refugio, weather turned grey and windy unfortunately, so we had a tough time setting up our tent on very rocky grounds and cooking our first time on the new gas stove we had bought in Pucón. It was simply freezing!! But the views were amazing even with the clouds and we hiked up a little hill to get warm and see it all from above. Not too bad!

After a night during which we more froze than slept, we woke up to a beautiful clear sky next morning. It is an amazing location to be camping at (for free), even though our whole body froze during cooking breakfast and washing up with ice water. Brrrrr…

What followed should be one of the toughest hiking days I have yet experienced. Our plan was to hike from Refugio Frey to Refugio San Martin (Laguna Jakob) which the local tourist/ trekking information in Bariloche had recommended to us. At the end of the day I felt like calling them up and saying something like: How DARE you recommend this hike to normal tourists and not warn them about the dangers!? But let me start from the beginning… when we discovered that the first part of our hike would be on frozen, slippery snow fields. No, we did not have crampons or walking sticks. Oh well, 2 wooden sticks we had found along the way LUCKILY. Honestly, we should have called it a day right then, turned around and hiked back down the same way we came from the other day. But something inside us was pushing us both – did we really carry all that luggage up for something that could have been done as a day trip? Was it not going to get better after the snow/ice fields? After all, this was the trek we got recommended to do. Whatever the exact reason was, we decided to go for it and push on. Up the steep snow field, I was relieved no-one of us had slipped and slided down into the half-frozen lakes.

I guess we were euphoric that we made it and were hoping that the hardest part would be behind us. So we decided to keep going instead of taking a different route down via Cerro Catedral. It was a very tough and slippery decent – basically mostly bigger loose rocks on loose sand. In the end, it was only shitty rocks anymore. I named it the shittiest decent ever. Little did I know that there should be another decent like this following, later during our day.

For a short while at least, we followed a rather easy and flat trail through the forest. Until we came to a river crossing where Mathijs flooded one of his shoes and I just decided to wade through the ice cold water barefoot. Brrrrr! It really was the day of challenges for us.

After the easy part, the trail went uphill again and we soon stood in front of a snow field again – only this time the snow was soft from the sunshine during the day and we sometimes sank in really deep. It felt safer in a way than the frozen snow from the morning, but it was tough to get up the steep mountain like this! In addition, the whole hill looked like a prime spot for avalanches to me – there were snow walls that looked as if they were gonna break off any moment and traces from previous avalanches that must have gone down just days before. I was basically shitting my pants climbing up as fast as possible, at the same time putting as little weight as possible on one spot at a time…(no photos because we were kind of distracted)

One might ask why we didn’t turn around at this stage. May I remind you of the shittiest decent ever? Which took about 2 h and would take even longer when having to go up? And once at the top we would have to follow the trail up Cerro Catedral and down on the other side… where we had no idea about potential snow fields or other challenges either? So I guess we were at a point of no return, where the only way to make things better was to keep going. We made it!! Well, obviously, or I would not be telling the story. We found some foot steps that were headed up a less dangerous looking section of the hill and slowly, cautiously made our way up. From the top, the views were amazing in both directions and we could already see Refugio San Martin at Laguna Jakob. Yay!

So close…but yet so far. What lay between us and our camping for the night was the shittiest decent ever, no. 2. It took forever on loose dirt and rocks and we were completely exhausted when we finally, finally arrived at the refuge. The night was freezing again and in the morning we woke up to frost on our tent! Brrrr…

We still had quite a walk downhill in front of us, but it was rather easy after what we had done the day before. However, at this stage we were both really tired from already 4 very active days, with no. 5 now following. The decent was rather uneventful, until we took a shortcut to get us to a closer bus stop in the end… and suddenly stood in front of a broad river without any bridge! Going back wasn’t really an option, so we scouted the shallowest, narrowest part of the river section, took off our shoes and waded through the ice cold water! Brrrr… I think I have never been cold so much so many times in a row, as during this 3 day hike.

Overall, it was worth it – but we certainly wouldn’t have done the crossing between Frey and Jakob if we knew of the dangers ahead of us. And it’s a hike I would definitely never do again! Needless to say, we were more than happy to spend the next day mainly sitting on the bus to Puerto Varas…