Beware of First Impressions

The bus trip from San Martin de las Andes to Bariloche was spectacular. Bariloche is on the foothills of the Andes and is beside a very large lake. There is a thing called the ‘7 Lake Tour’ where you take a car and drive from Bariloche to San Martin de las Andes so we have done at least 2 of these lakes and probably have seen some of the others on the trip down. We had high expectations of Bariloche but things weren’t quite as expected on arrival. Put simply, Bariloche as a town just isn’t very pretty. It looks as though big business has been allowed to do what it likes so the lakefront is all hotels. Nice if you have a room looking onto the lake but nowhere for the rest of us to enjoy a beer or an ice cream looking onto the water. The high street is mostly shops full of tat. Bariloche is famous for chocolate but the most famous chocolate shop of all has a queue round the block. We walked for a long time searching for something to eat and eventually settled on what you might call the least worse place we could find. They took our order then forgot about it. It was only a sandwich and we were the only customers so that’s quite hard to achieve. When it arrivedit was a bit rubbish. Moving on we went to the supermarket to get something to cook for the evening (we were in a studio apartment). It could be we were in the most depressing supermarket we had ever experienced. We bought nothing. Not a great start!

And then…..

It turns out that about 1 minutes walk from our apartment there is a very nice Italian deli. Game on. Lots of lovely things to buy and best not ask the price of anything. And we found an excellent wine for around £4, and even better at 3 for 2. Things started to look up. Then we went out at night and everything is different. Some very nice pubs and restaurants. You just don’t see them during the day. The apartment turns out to be great. It has underfloor heating so you can wash your clothes and simply throw them wet on the floor and they are dry by morning. Once you get out of the town there is a lot to do, including some great hiking. Now we really like Bariloche.

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