Adventures in Bariloche

A cool skiing army guy statue. Taken during the prep for a protectin' shot, moments before one of the soldiers came out with his M-16 and told us kindly to stop taking pictures of their base.

We spent our Monday afternoon having a chocolate taste test. Note the secret ballots and the pallete cleansing fluids.

Endless hours on a bus finally drove me to the point of insanity, where I began conversing with the happy mexican fellow that fell out of my kinder surprise.

Just protectin' the weirdest border I`ve ever seen (Chile & Argentina)

After finally escaping the clutchs of Tierra Del Fuego, we have managed to begin working our way back up the other side of Argentina. Our bus schedule was pretty horid, with one 12 hour day bus, then a 5 hour wait, then a 12 hour night bus, then a 14 hour wait, then finish it off with another 14 hour bus to Bariloche, where we are now. The city we waited in for 14 hours was called Comodorio Riveria (Im actually not sure about that spelling...) but it's basically a working city with very little to do besides visiting their famed Petroleum museum, which we quickly opted out of. Our day was spent walking aimlessly through the city, shopping for a leather jacket (it's retardedly cheap down here so I ended up buying one) and attempting to learn how to walk on our hands (this was one of the original feats we all hoped to be able to accomplish upon returning home, and have so far made little progress). We finally arrived in Bariloche on Sunday morning sometime and are now settled in quite nicely. When picturing Bariloche, just imagine a cross between Whistler village and that chocolate town that Homer Simpson visits from time to time. There are so many chocolate shops here, that yesterday we decided to have a chocolate testing session to determine who makes the best. A single bar of milk chocolate was purchased from each of the 8 major chocolate barons, then painstakingly sampled by the 3 of us back at the hostel (with mandatory pallete cleansing in between). Rapa Nui was declared as the victor by way of secret ballot (sorry Doris, Mamuschke was tied for 3rd...). Anyway, Jason has the full results and will most likely go into far greater detail for this momentous event. Yesterday I also managed to send home the aforementioned leather jacket which I purchased. Everything was fine until the woman discovered I was attempting to send 3 Brasilian soccer jerseys along with it. She made a spectacle of me in front of the entire crowded post office (some booing and hissing aimed at me) and it was all fun and games until she pulled out my Ronaldinho jersey. I boldly stated that Ronaldinho (Ronaldinho being a Brasilian and arguably the best living soccer player on the planet at the moment) was superior to Maradona (being one of the previous best soccer players and of course Argentina's pride and joy) and at that point the workers changed from bored, quiet, government postal employees, to vengeful Argentinian soccer hooligans. I was virtually thrown out of the building and won't be surprised if my package gets mailed directly to the garbage dump. Went for a 20-30km bike ride this afternoon, and somehow didn't make it to either of the places we tried to reach and ended up just watching a bunch of crazy motorcross guys fly off of piles of dirt. We leave for Mendoza on Thursday and following that we'll be off to Santiago. Adios!