Our tiny hotel, La Posada de Hamelin, is a fairy tale house, covered in vines of creeping ivy, and surrounded with beautiful flowers. The owners are inviting and have created a warm and welcoming place, and we’re glad to be able to call this home for the last days of our trip. And….the breakfast is simply stellar. Everything is homemade by the owners. They refer to it as un desayuno para golosos….breakfast for gluttons…. sadly, it’s true! We eat enough to last til dinner!
Andres’ cousin has moved to El Bolson from Buenos Aires, and has now been living in town for a handful of years and part of our time in town was dedicated to seeing him, his lovely home on a staggeringly large 6 acre lot, complete with hen house, apple orchard, and small vegetable garden. The dogs and cats roam around freely, playing and resting in the huge area. The views are stunning: from the back up to the stone sculpted slopes of the Piltriquitron range, and from the spacious front porch over the valley of the Rio Azul and the Andes beyond. He is still in the middle of a large undertaking, that of constructing a theatre/cinema complex complete with a café and a permanent home for the radio station that is already up and running. The project also includes a recently inaugurated outdoor cinema/stage where he screens movies nightly, after about 10 pm. (It's not dark enough before that). An ambitious undertaking which he hopes to finish in the next 6-9 months. A nice cultural addition for the town. Check it out on Facebook at GOGA Bolson.
The town is a mishmash of unbridled growth, lots of traffic, and shops which all seem to crowd around and near the main square, Plaza Pagano, which is where most of the action in town takes place. There are impromptu music acts, an extensive craft fair 4 days per week, and it is definitely the hangout place for many of the young backpacker types passing through town. While the town isn’t particularly interesting, the surrounding area offers a wealth of places to visit. Lago Puelo is about 10km south of town, in yet another national park, and easily reached by public bus. The Rio Azul valley offers a slew of refugios (mountain huts), and if one has the time, there is well over a week of hikes that connect about 10 of them. There is lots of camping available, and despite the short distance, these spots are worlds away from the hustle and bustle of the town.
We spent two separate days at Lago Puelo. The first day we hiked up to the viewpoint from which one can see a good portion of the lake, the crescent of beach, and as far as Chile and the Andes. We continued the path which leads through forest, open country, and finally along a path of green grass bordered on both sides with huge tangled bushes of slowly ripening blackberries—which we spent a fair amount of time sampling! We also went around a smaller loop which is home to a grove of pitra trees--a relative to the arrayan-- which is indigenous to the area and thrives on Lake Puelo's regular flooding. The sky was clear, blue, and immensely wide and by afternoon very hot. We hopped on the bus to the friendly “downtown” of Lago Puelo town, which lies about 4 km outside the park entrance, in the hopes of finding a place to just sit and sip something and enjoy the afternoon, but everything was tightly shut until much later in the afternoon, so we got back on the bus and returned to El Bolson.
The following day we decided to head to the “beach” at Lago Puelo, finding ourselves too lazy to make the 7-8 hour hike we had originally planned. As we arrived at the beach, the distant mountains appeared to be shrouded in a fog, which continued to descend until there was a veritable curtain of “fog” over the lake. Turns out that this was volcanic ash, which the particular wind direction of the day had swept into place. A most curious phenomenon, as it eventually made a low-lying dome over the area—covering even most of El Bolson—and literally making one’s eyes gritty and irritated, and increasing the feeling of the heat, by containing it. We’d never seen anything like it, but it’s a phenomenon that the area—particularly a little further north, nearer to Bariloche—has been experiencing due to continued fallout from a volcanic eruption, which even now continues to spew smoke and ash from time to time.
Day 2 at the lake: volcanic ash fills the skies at Lago Puelo.
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