Enjoying the Lakes District

Here is an interactive Google map with blue flags to locate the cities mentioned in the write up….incase you were wishing or wondering ….. View From Santiago we headed south to check out the lakes district and the resort towns of Pucon, Chile, San Martin de Los Andes and Bariloche in Argentina.

On our way we ran into a couple, John and Gabriella, from Santiago on a new red GS Adventure. John is originally from Australia and Gabriella is originally from Buenos Aires. John is building a Motorcycle Touring business. It is called South American Motorbike Tours. The website is http://www.samotorbikrtours.com/ . They gave us some good advice on routes, what to see and where to stay. We had lunch with them in one of Chile’s famous ski towns, Pucon. In Pucon they ski down a volcano. It looked to be a steep descent. We rode with John and Gabriella to another interesting little ski town called San Martin de Los Andes. We spent the night there and walked around town. Funny how, if you changed the language, it could have been any ski town in the world.

Cool Caballeros. We instantly decided we needed a hat like that.

The first of many Chile Argentina Argentina Chile border crossings. Argentina requested if we had purchased Argentina insurance for our motorcycles. From where? We are in the middle of nowhere???? They didn't push it and let us in.

As we continued south we traveled through the picturesque “Lake District” roads heavily promoted by the Argentine travel industry for well founded reasons. The planned route was 80% pavement for the day. We ended up making a wrong turn and enjoyed an 80 percent dirt route that followed the shoreline of a beautiful lake. Some of the views of the bright blue green lake were simply stunning. The dirt road condition was not all that challenging so we could enjoy the views. We rejoined the pavement on Ruta 40 (Route 40), more on this famous route later. We did a lunch stop in Bariloche. It is a well known Argentine ski town. By now we had our fill of ski towns and pushed on further south after lunch and spent the night in El Bolson.

Ohhhh....so cute.

Our first introduction to the Argentina art of Asado. Much more on that later.

Great views and fun roads....

Barilochi

We met the rider of this motorcycle in Barilochi. He was from Buenos Aires and obviously skilled at welding aluminum. We rode south together out of our final ski town visited.

Before leaving Argentina we stopped in the town of Esquel. This is the little mining town that was made famous by the 30 year old book “The Old Patagonia Express”. The town has capitalized on the train’s notoriety and promotes one day train excursions from the town to a national park and back. The remains of the original wooden train, the author rode, still exist. It is in the train yard next to the station. It consists of one car and some sub frames. It doesn’t look like it is destine to exist on this earth very long. If you just walked up to the train station you would completely ignore the remains, no sign, nothing. Anyway we are going back in to Chile for some really fun roads and sights.