Stopover in Los Antiguos

Well, we’re in Los Antiguos, a main street type town about 5 km from the Chilean border on the preposterously windy Lake Buenos Aires, which lies partly in Argentina and partly in Chile—where it has been given a different name.  Our  hotel is small, but full, and there appear to be about zero other “tourists” in town.  Los Antiguos’ main claim to fame is that due to the gift of volcanic ash from a Chilean eruption in the early 90’s, the soil has become much more fertile, and the small cherry farms that already existed have become far more productive.

After a meager breakfast we head down the main drag to the tourist information office to get the lay of the land.  Amazingly they are open from early morning til midnight!  There is clearly NOT a great deal happening in town, but we attempt to get some info on the area called Monte Zeballos, a rocky mountain area about 70 km to the south, on, you guessed it, a dirt road.  The only trips the office pushes are to Cueva de las Manos—which we’ve decided to skip.  This is a cave with handprints that are reputedly about 7000 years old, but we’ve heard differing accounts of how much you are actually given access to, and considering the distance(and the dirt roads!) we forego that one.  The other big push is to cross the border to Chile Chico—a small border town—and from what we can gather, it is pretty much like where we are.

Summing up, we decide to take the next bus out, which is two days away.  We make our way to the bus station—which is huge albeit empty—and get our tickets for the bus, which will leave at 6:30 am, and is about a 2 km walk from the hotel. No matter.

Highlights:  the cherries are indeed delicious.  We buy them from a little old man at his roadside home/hut/farm, where he shovels generous amounts into bags and calls it a kilo.  On the second day we revisit him, take his picture, and then he beckons us inside and shows us his portrait in a book about people in Patagonia.  He’s beaming as he tells us that we can probably find the book on the….internet.

We find one place to have a cup of tea—no make that two—although the second takes us most of our visit to find.  We insist on trying to find the “lakeshore”, but after repeated wandering down dead end dirt roads devoid of any sign of humanity, find the “costanera”, which is the “coastal road”.  There are actually a handful of souls fishing on the shores of the vast wind-blasted lake, and there is a very nice sort of boulevard—perhaps people hang out here during the annual cherry festival which just took place over the past weekend—although it’s difficult to tell, and there is no-one to ask!  As we walk to the end there is a huge hosteria which purports to have a café.  We hightail in and enjoy something to drink, although we are the only customers in this vast place.

We also have to mention that despite our lack of finding pretty much anything to do in town, the mountains we want to visit can only be reached by private car—which we don’t have—or with a tour guide, who never gets back to us, and is not ever in his office.  Oh well.  We were also planning to walk across the border to Chile Chico, but got such a variety of distance estimates, that we finally threw in the towel.  Instead we criss-cross the town, investigating every conceivable little market and shop—most of which were shut tight most of the time. 

Ah yes, we also make a visit the local clinic/hospital.  Andres chipped a tooth on a cherry pit, so we made our way into the dentist’s office there.  No appointment necessary for us.  A couple of tourists with a tooth issue.  The lady dentist sat him down, fixed the tooth provisionally right then and there, and sent us on our way—with a reminder that cherries have pits!  No cost whatsoever.  We were quite frankly stunned at the level of service available in this backwater.  Looking forward to moving on though, in all honesty.