Bus. Bariloche. Bikes.

We survived our 27-hour bus ride! It was surprisingly easy, we slept most of the time and watched movies the rest. Our driver chose not-terrible movies that were mostly (3/5) subtitled in Spanish rather than dubbed. Bus was long in part because we had to go southeast to the coast, up, and over instead of a straight shot North. We had a surprise bus transfer, during which a dog peed on Priscilla's bag. I also spent a lot of time failing at not scratching my many bug bites. Pretty sure our El Chalten hostel had bedbugs, so my arms and legs are a mess. Priscilla is a day ahead of me healing, they went for her the first night and me the second.

Anyway, Bariloche! Argentina's biggest vacation spot, styled on a Swiss village. We're in the shoulder season between summer and skiing. I came in with low expectations (touristy, expensive) but it's been great! We're staying in a hostel which is a converted penthouse of a 10-floor apt building. Tonight we tried to walk the line of taps at a microbrewery ("cervezeria"), but we ate too much dinner to continue into the second half of drafts.

During the day we biked ~37km on the Circuito Chico, a loop of road winding through mountains past 7 lakes. We rented bikes and helmets and had a leisurely 4 hour ride plus 2 hour side-hike (in the blog post review process Priscilla is disapproving of my use of "leisurely"; it seems that steep hills and lots of pedaling are not the right conditions for using this word). A welcome change from hiking all day!

Now for some Bariloche trivia- the Huemul Project. In the early 50s, Péron sponsored a German scientist who convinced him he could make a viable fusion reactor. The scientist set up shop building a state-of-the-art facility on an island near Bariloche and spent the modern equivalent of $300 million before announcing successful fusion, but without providing any real proof. Visiting scientists and subsequent investigatory committees determined it was a fraud, and the temperatures achieved were orders of magnitude too low to achieve fusion. So, first big push for fusion power, and all the leftover equipment got put to good use by subsequent Argentine scientific efforts, so now there's a working fission reactor in Bariloche and Argentina exports nuclear power expertise! I looked in to visiting these locations but unfortunately no tours.

-Peter