Finding Sarah

...or a lot of rain and chocolate

Mendoza was catch up time. We spent our days there visiting the vineyards (which are not as pretty as Cape Towns but still offer very good wine and liqueurs) and going to a SPA! How exciting! A whole day of hydro-massages, hot water, clay packs and massages, not to mention the most delicious and abundant buffet lunch. I felt like a new person after such luxury. The massage was so good that I fell into a blissful sleep half way through.

After Mendoza, we headed down south to the ski town of Bariloche. Being post-summer and pre-ski season, there was a lot that was shut, not-so-good weather and a lot of toe-numbing cold. This was all made up for, however, with the fact that this town makes chocolate. Seriously, wherever you look there are chocolate shops and little factories. I was in heaven! It really didn’t matter what the weather was doing outside except that it gave us a good excuse to be inside drinking hot chocolate (which was quite literally only-just-liquid chocolate) and eating truffles. It’s a good thing we didn’t stay there too long. And we did, in all fairness to ourselves, make it on a very nice walk around some nearby, rather spectacular lakes. Bariloche is very different from where I have been so far. It’s a bit like a little European ski town (from what I gather). Very pristine. Very beautiful, just not very wild.I had a hard time deciding whether to go further south to the glaciers, or give in to the cold and head a little further north. I’m afraid that I wimped out on this one: I was seriously worried that I might lose a toe or two to frostbite. Hence we went on our way back across to Chile in search of a volcano to climb. Pucon is a cute little town severely overpriced and built, I am sure, solely for the adventurous tourist. It also has very cosy hostels, which was great considering that it rained non-stop the entire day and a half we were there. No volcanoes for us this time, but lots of average TV watching and some Spanish homework.