"Summer turns to high" - about bloody time.

Woke up this mornin' headache this big, pay all these damn bills, feed all these damn kids!

Woke up this morning and turned on the gas stove, firstly to warm my very cold hands and secondly to heat some water for a cup of tea - there ain't no electric kettles 'round 'ere mate! All that done and a shower later, i phoned up Eduardo and Kirsi whom i had met in Salta back in November, they told me they were around so we wanted to do something one of these days.

We met up in town and went for ...yet another...cup of tea. We spoke about what our trips had in store for us and what had happened since we separated, i filled in the table with stories about hitch-hiking and labradors looking after my tent in Cuesta Blanca, he contributed to the conversation with stories about the amazing salt plains in Jujuy, their trip in Bolivia and the sauna like conditions they had been experiencing in Buenos Aires with 90% humidity these last few days.

It turns out, interestingly, that their trip had not gone as straight forward as mine, yeah okay i broke my camera and got sore feet from hours of hitch-hiking, but they had a lot worse. Whilst unloading bags from a taxi at an omnibus terminal in Bolivia, some people snatched two of Edu's bags, containing his excellent Canon450D SLR camera, three 8gb memory cards, and of course the back ups of thousands of photos on a DVD disc in the secondary bag...oh and just in case that wasn't enough, that second bag also contained his Spanish passport and his Argentine passport..."fml" as he could have rightly said.

They managed to put all this behind, and i gave them some photos of our time together back in November which somewhat filled that empty void in his heart from all the photos that were stolen. We cooked some lunch and took off to do something with this magnificent day that had unfolded above us...perfect blue skies with very light, almost non-existent winds (Bariloche tends to be very windy because it is in a very open area). We took the bus 20 to km 17 of Gustillos Avenue, this one borders the lake and eventually turns into Circuito Chico which is a very scenic tourist route that one can drive and stop around the various lakes, rivers, and high points.

Kilometre 17 of Gustillos is the base of Mt. Campanario, or as it is more correctly said here, Cerro Campanario. This 1052m hill has a cablechair that takes you all the way to the summit in a matter of minutes, on a cold and windy day you have to be brave to enjoy it, but today it was not such a day, today was an ideal day for this kinda thing, perfect visibility to what seemed hundreds of km's away. We spent about half an hour at the summit, taking photos, admiring the view, and greeting the local cat population (which as surveyed by a recent sensus currently consists of one very old cat).

The way down was just as scenic and after hitchiking back to KM 12 we had something to eat at the beach of the lake.

A very nice day out, of which i hope i will have more of soon, just waiting for my driving course to finish then i will be free to roam once again. We are thinking of setting up a tent on lago Gutierrez and camping out there for a few days. Might get my fishing permit sorted and see what i can find, some trout for dinner would sure come as a treat!

Gonna start climbing more of the local mountains soon too, Cerro Catedral now has next to no snow on the summit so is all safe to hike and so are most of the other mountains around. Good times ahead for sure, i will hopefully climb something next week and post that on here.

That's all for now,
Thanks for reading!

Santiago.