5TH - 6TH JANUARY 2007

We were up nice and early to catch our bus down Ruta 40, we had to get to the bus stop for 8.45, but we managed to be there for 8.20 so a bit of a wait was in order until our bus showed up at about ten past nine. The bus looked fairly ordinary for something which was going to be our virtual home for the next two days, but we kept an open mind. The bus had started in Bariloche, and it looked like we were the only people going from El Bolson. There seemed to be a distinct lack of organisation, a lady came over and didn’t seem to be expecting us, until another lady told her that we must be the missing people from the Tango Inn Hostel in Bariloche!! This despite the fact that our ticket had “El Bolson” written in big letters on it! We were then told to just get on the bus, which we did, but as soon as we’d found a seat we were told that we were sitting in someone else’s seat and we would have to wait until everyone who’d gone to the garage had got on to see which

seats were spare! Once we’d finally waited it turned out that the bus was full, and we couldn’t even sit together - very annoying since when we’d booked our tickets about three weeks ago there was hardly anyone on it!! Some seat numbers on the tickets would have been nice, as the bus had them!! Also really annoying was that the two people who we had to sit next to were actually travelling together, they just wanted to sit by the window!! Not the best start to the journey but we figured hey ho, it could be worse!!

The first few hours were on the main paved road that we’d travelled into Bariloche on, so true to form I spent them sleeping!! By the time we arrived at the dirt road it had got very hot, and this is when we found out that the bus had no air conditioning, all they managed was a couple of Indian bus style fans, which were very noisy, buzzy things, one of which was right above our