12 dec - From Bariloche, we drove the famous "7 lakes drive" to Junin de Los Andes, the reported "trout fishing capital of Patagonia", supposedly a good base camp for hiking and fishing trips. The 7 Lakes Drive, turned out to be a bit of a rough one, instead of the 2 hour drive our hotel suggested, it actually took about 4 or 5 hours of driving on a rough gravel-road. Despite the driving, the views were quite beautiful - we indeed passed 7 lakes and a few rivers - all gorgeous. Junin is a small town, not at all like the touristy town of Bariloche. Many of the roads in the town are gravel as well - we are not sure of the reason for this - finance or better for snow removal in the winter? We stayed at a neato 1940´s style fishing lodge with views of the Rio Chimehuin out our window - thanks to the recommendation of Ben´s fisherman friend, Galen Mercer.
13 dec - We left Junin in the AM and drove up the Rio Chimehuin towards Parque Nacional Lanin. Andrew fished while I examined the local flora and fauna - he caught a bunch of trout including one large brown. As we drove into the Parque (more evil gravel roads), there was a gaucho horse race - quite an interesting event. We stopped and watched a few of the races and ate some of the local fare - not suprisingly - meat. We took a campsite on Lago Paimun - gorgeous views of the lake and mountains surrounding it; we shared our site with horses and cows and sheep, and an all-too-friendly pitbull who desired greatly to sleep in our tent with us - we allowed a few minutes under the fly... That night we hiked to a waterfall not far from the campsite - the picture above is taken from behind the waterfall of our campsite on the lake (it´s a confusing photo).
14 dec - We awoke early after a restless night fighting for tent space with the pitbull. We proceeded on a 16 mile hike along Lago Paimun and then up the Rio Paimun to a small lake called Lago del Blanco. We ended up getting to an inpenetrable mosquito-infested marsh that we think was downstream from the lake. Regardless, we sprayed on the DEET, at lunch and fished in some small, but gorgeous streams. Andrew caught four enormous trout and many smaller ones, Leigh caught 2 but wasn´t trying hard, and whose counting anyway?
15-16 Dec - We slept in Junin, collected food supplies and went to Lago Lolog for a 2 day trek. We initially thought of doing a 3 day trip, but for the first time in our whole journey, the weather was hurrendous. In addition, we have been discovering that the topo maps and other hiking maps produced for Patagonia are hurrendously innaccurate. It has not really been a problem, but for this trip, where we crossed many large rivers and streams, it turned into an issue. The most accurate topo map was completely wrong in many places. Dispite these complications, our trout fishing was not hurt - Leigh caught 2 large trout (brown and rainbow) and Andrew caught a bunch too. We decided to seek refuge in San Martin de Los Andes - a larger, more touristy town than Junin - but a hot shower was in order after the rain and cold and fish!
4 comments:
The fishing photos are awesome. So awesome. As is the photo of Andrew downing a beer and clutching a bone. He's gone native.
Wow, this part of the trip looks so phenomenally beautiful! Sorry to hear about the couple days of bad weather, though.
Nice depth-of-field on some of those photos.
ben - you NEED to visit Patagonia. It is not uncommon to catch these phenomenally gorgeous fish - what a pleasure! Mostly the fishing is catch-and-release and all the rivers in the Parks are fly-fishing only. As Andrew mostly spin-casts, that can be aggravating. BUT, the rivers are prestine and since it´s mostly catch-and-release, the fish are enormous and plentiful. . . what a pleasure!
rachel - it´s amazing what our little point-and-shoot can do. Unfortunately, it can be very frustrating when taking pictures of little things (flowers, bugs, etc) and the camera refuses to focus on what I want it to focus on. otherwise, for a p-a-s it´s fabulous. I do dream about digital SLRs, but I wouldn´t want to carry one with us here in the woods or even in the cities - either it weighs too much, or it calls attention to ourselves as rich foreigners. . . oh, and, this area is incredible! i recommend coming here to anyone - it´s so interesting because the environment is like the best of Colorado, Utah, Montana, Washington, Wyoming, and California in a much smaller space - there are incredible geological formations (like the deserts of Utah) right next to rivers stuffed to the gill (so to speak) with huge trout (maybe like Glacier in Montana, but not a good comparison). Apparently there are rivers with salmon as well (like Washington or Gaspe in CAN), but we have not seen evidence yet - maybe in Chile? Just incredible country. . .
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