Postcard from Patagonia

One thing I have noticed on this trip is that generally when confronted by a spectacular landscape, the Argentinians like to mess with it. In most places this means stringing telephone wires across nice views, but occasionally they find a place so arrestingly beautiful that they really have to go for it. Bariloche is one of these places, with gorgeous sapphire lakes ringed with snow-topped mountains and dappled forests. How can we naff this up, then? you can imagine the town planners of yore debating amongst themselves. Fortunately they called in the Disney corporation and the 1980s, so the resulting effect is all faux swiss chalets, stone cladding and triangular Smurf houses. The town is a heady mixture of ski shops and souvenir shops selling novelty items made of wood-, huge curly handled spoons, cute hanging signs for the bathroom showing winsome children with their sweet little buttocks sticking out, and that sort of thing. There is also a bewildering array of local collectible goblin-gnomes. I hate goblin-gnomes, and these ones are particularly toothy and malevolent, causing me to yelp and leap backwards when I find one peering at me from a shop corner. Added to this for some insane reason the shop mannequins have labrador heads where there should be human faces. This is really, really scary.

Currently Bariloche is suffering from the after-effects of a nearby volcanic eruption over the border in Chile, which tipped piles of ash everywhere, rather as if someone had up-ended the contents of a hoover bag over the whole area. This weird gritty stuff, combined with freezing temperatures and all those ski lodges, gives Bariloche a sort of perma-Christmas après-ski vibe. At night everything is lit up with warm golden lights and becomes rather lovely. Of particular note are the chocolate shops which are like little jeweled palaces crammed to the ceilings with every possible size, shape and flavour of the good stuff. These, and the hot chocolate served in the tea parlour at Rapa Nui Chocolate, which came in a cup and saucer with pink roses on it, are worth the journey to Bariloche on their own. Throw in some excellent hiking in the surrounding area and you can forgive the town itself for its fondness for fondue and kitsch.

Pleased with Patagonia we caught an overnight bus to Comodoro Rivadavia, 15 hours south, where we hoped to break up the epic journey to the Perito Moreno Glaciar at El Calafate, 1000km to the south. The minor pleasantries of welcoming Bariloche had left us completely unprepared for this horrible little hell-mouth attached like a veruca to the atlantic coastline. I have seldom experienced such an instant and violent hatred for a place. It wasn’t just the setting- a gruesome parody of the alpine setting we had just left, with the mountains replaced by a wind-whipped, petrol stained sandbar strewn with plastic bags and dirty nappies. It wasn’t even the fact that there was a huge concrete car park squatting like a toad in the middle of town, where everywhere else has a leafy tree lined plaza. What really took our breath away was the prices. Without even the slightest embarrassment the patrons of various hostelries asked us the most ludicrous prices for their shabby accommodations, perhaps 3 or 4 times the going rate anywhere else in the country. Comodoro Rivadavia- let’s be clear on this fact, in case you are ever in the vicinity, is an unrepentant shitsack of a location. It makes even-tempered people (Chris) laugh mirthlessly at each new thoughtless oversight or carefully contrived rip-off. It made not exactly even- tempered people (me) positively psychotic. Had it been in my power I would have called in an airstrike. And the people! Why don’t fat people realize that leggings are not for them? Why do people with a huge trolley full of shopping push in front of you in supermarket queues when they can see you only want to buy a packet of crisps? Do you so lack even a drop of human kindness that you cannot put a left luggage area in your capacious bus station so people don’t have to lug their backpacks around? Why yes, you do! By this point I was actually hurling expletives at passing cars and crossing the road on purpose to kick locals and dogs. Even the murals on the playground wall at the kindergarten looked like they had been painted by demons instead of normal human children.

‘We are LEAVING!’ I stormed at Chris ‘Why aren’t you taking better care of me? Take me to a pub at once!’ (It was 8.30am). Instead, we decided to go to the bus stop and buy the first ticket out of there. The choice we were given was to stay until 9.45pm and then catch the overnight bus, or to leave at 3pm and spend the night on the bus station floor at Rio Gallegos. No contest. I childishly flicked V signs at passersby as we glided out of town on the 3pm bus. And I say to the municipality of Comodoro Rivadavia and its inhabitants and I have never meant this sentence more sincerely- FUCK YOU.