say yes! to the lake district

this entry comes to you from mendoza, argentina. next time i work in south america for several months, i'm going to work in argentina. because it's pretty great here. but let's get right to the pictures! (soon i won't have anything interesting to show everyone, so i'm trying to really live up my last fews days in the limelight. so there's a lot of pictures.)

this is puerto montt. it's...just like this. it's on one of the lakes, so that's nice, and there's a sort of charming city center, but other than that...well, here it is. it was also cold here. when i went to the bathroom at my little crappy sleeping place i realized my pee had steam just like my breath. i thought about including a a picture like when i was throwing up, but my mom tells me she's given the blog address to quite a few of her friends, so i decided i'd only embarrass her as far as mentioning the pee. hi, mom!

after puerto montt i went to entre lagos. this is the lake at entre lagos. or one of them...since entre lagos means "between lakes" it stands to reason there's another lake nearby. which i never saw. but they probably would have changed the name by now if it was an error. and really, the area has about a thousand lakes, so maybe they didn't mean directly between two lakes, just sort of among the lakes. entre lagos can mean among lakes, too. what i'm trying to say is, the lake district is really awesome because it's up in the patagonian mountains, and there's a lot of lakes and mountains. there. i just came right out and said it. i'm way too subtle on this blog.

i went on a hike in a national park near entre lagos, from which you could see this view. this is the kind of thing i was talking about when i said it's awesome. it pretty much goes on like this forever. or seemingly forever. which is good enough to give you the effect.


here's entre lagos in the morning. if you're me, you're thinking smoke on the water. dun dun duuuuuun, dun dun dun dun! and so on.





i wanted to go from entre lagos (a tiny little town in chile) to bariloche. EVERYONE i asked said i could wait on this road and a bus would come along and pick me up. and, after about two hours of waiting a bus did come. i grabbed my bag, walked to the shoulder, waved my arms...and choked on a lot of dust as the bus went right on by me. several conflicting pieces of advice later, i finally succeeded by jumping right in front of a bus so it would stop. that didn't really happen. anyway, this was the view while i waited. not too shabby.

this is what the road to bariloche looked like. patagonia, hooray! seriously, you should go to argentina. or check out these other pictures.





my head said "try to get a better shot", but my hand said "put the glove back on or i'm going home". for the record, the patagonian mountains do NOT slant weirdly. nor does my mouth, at least to my knowledge. or does it...? this is me on top of cerro catedral, where i went skiing. if there is another place like this on the planet, i want to go there, too, because this was really, truly, totally amazing.

i guess i probably should have said the "amazing" stuff in a picture where you can actually see the scenery. standing at the top, you can see probably...oh, about 200 degrees or more around. this is about a fourth of the view. it was (say it with me, now) much better in person. i have about a million more pictures, but eunice and theodore need to get to bed sometime before 7:30, so i'm going to quit with the mountain pictures.

awhile back i showed you all the naríz del diablo (devil's nose, remember?). in colca canyon, our guide showed us a weed called el cojón del diablo (um...ask your mother) whose seeds made a hallucinogenic tea. well, this is el dedo de dios, or finger of God. but dedo de dios is fun to say. try it!


anyway. i've got a couple days in mendoza, unless the pass closes again, in which case i won't be able to get to my flight, and maybe i'll have lots more days in mendoza. we'll just have to see! if all goes as planned, i'll see you all in august!