(Bariloche, Argentina)

Travel is a series of trade-offs. You can’t do everything…and sometimes the unplanned and chaotic can be just as rewarding as a carefully curated itinerary.

As you can tell from my past two posts, we had a sensational day of travel from Peulla to Bariloche. Our friends in the group tour did not have quite the same experience when they made that trip a day earlier in windy and rainy conditions. However, while we were catching up to them under the brilliant Andean sun, they were able to enjoy the resort of Bariloche in that same great weather.  You win some, you lose some.

I had hoped to go skiing in Bariloche: it’s been a long-shot dream of mine to ski on every continent and South America would have been the 4th.  Alas, we had to move on to Buenos Aires the very next morning and it was logistically impossible for me to do any skiing in Bariloche.  Well, this now gives me an even better excuse for a future trip to Argentina and/or Chile. There is so much to see and do in these two countries; we could not hope to get more than just a small sample in less than two weeks.

We did at least have a chance to visit downtown Bariloche for a group dinner at the Familia Weiss restaurant.   As you can tell from the name of the restaurant, there is a very strong German-speaking history in this part of Argentina.

Starting in the mid-1800s, immigrants from the various German-speaking nations in Europe found their way to this part of South America.   Their influence lives on in the Germanic cuisine, the alpine architecture, and the many chocolate makers who continue to compete for the tourist dollar.  I hadn’t expected to eat Gulasch mit Spätzle in the shadow of the Andes…but why not?

While we would have liked to spend more time in the mountains around Bariloche, we were assured that we would love our next stop:  the legendary city of Buenos Aires.  It’s a huge place with about 14 million people…and, at the end of the 19th century, it was one of the richest cities in the world.  While the city and the country alike have faced many challenges since then, those long-ago glory days are still very much apparent today.

Upon arrival at the Jorge Newbery airport, we were whisked to our hotel in the southern part of the Recoleta barrio.  Over the next few days, we would visit various barrios and get a feel for the different characteristics of each one.   Stay tuned for lots of coverage of this fascinating, if atypical, South American metropolis!