Day 287: Villa de la Angostura – Argentina – Mar 31st

Waking up, we realized that our inflatable sleeping pad is starting to leak. BOTH our pads are leaking, which makes it very odd, but we can’t really figure out where it is leaking as it is leaking at a slow rate. Guess we’ll just have to wake up in the middle of the night and inflate it a bit…..

We spent all morning trying to find a ‘breakfast’ place, took us forever to find something that’s open as Argentines like to eat late, and even harder to find a parking spot amidst the traffic. We contemplated of picking up a kilo of ice cream for the trip back, but sadly we left empty handed thinking we can pick something up in the next town (which we didn’t).

The drive in the Lakes District really is amazing, with winding roads weaving between mountains and lakes. Photogenic is a simple word, but sometimes pictures really don’t do a place justice as you it is hard to capture the whole atmosphere into a single photograph. The combination of the landscapes, the driving, singing along to our iPhone and the nice people you strike 5min conversations with made it an enjoyable drive.

Back into the town we visited before, this time still with daylight, we did a bit more sightseeing up the mountains, and we even stopped by for a beer in an craft brewery. This town with its lakes, is also the base of a massive ski complex, which makes it quite a tourist destination all year round. That really doesn’t justify how it has 3 craft brewers in a town of 5000! We grabbed a few pints at another beautifully decorated log cabin brewery, but the beers weren’t of high quality. One little snag was that we forgot we ran out of money! So we ended up paying with a combination of pesos and dollars, but they were jerks and gave us the official FX rate of 5 instead of the ‘blue’ market rate of 7.5-8!!

We checked a few stores and ended up buying a bottle of wine, just so we can use our $100USD bill to get some pesos in return. Haha. Win/Win situation? And the best part though, is that we managed to find the LAST TWO beds in a hostel! Woohoo! No more camping tonight!