El Bolson, Esquel & Rio Gallegos

Hello at last.... finally we have found a place with Internet... hello civilization!!!!!
A lot has happened since our last post...
El Bolson was a very colourful and happy place. It was founded in the seventies by hippies who wanted to create an ecological community. Today they make mostly jams and artifacts. We did a couple of hikes in the forest surrounding it and I bought some jewelry at the artists market... in general it was a very nice place to visit, we had a lot of fun.



We then decided to travel south to a town called Esquel. We thought it will be easier to rent an SUV there to drive to the ¨Carretera Austral"- the main and only dirt road (850 km long) that passes threw the reservations of south Chile. The place itself is a total hole with nothing to do.

We spent a couple of days trying to find a car but with no luck... and were pretty bummed.
Finally we decided to go directly to El Calafate (south Argentina) and skip the Carretera. (the other option was to do it by hitch hiking and i wasn´t too eager to do that) . Before leaving we decided to take an organized tour to the national park nearby. It turned out to be just us and an old Spanish driver in a beat up Reno... it was pretty embarrassing.... but the park was very pretty....


We took a bus to El Calafate with a stop in a city called Rio Gallegos. With our luck they were moving some boat the same night so there was a lot of confusion and we waited at the bus station for ages. In the middle of all the mess a man came up to Alon and asked Loni to kiss him.
When he didn´t oblige the man showed him his Id and said ¨that's OK I am inspector...kiss me¨... the confused Alon who by then looked like a deer caught in front of a car looked around in panic but the man kept on insisting... finally we noticed he was pointing at our tickets...he wanted to tell us to what platform to go and apparently confused ¨give me¨with kiss me¨...shows how well they know English here... anyhow the ride took 22 hours and was horrible... the bus kept stopping because of some mechanical problem and drove 20 km/h half of the time. When we arrived to Rio Gallegos all the hotels were full (surprising because there is nothing to do there). We walked for 2 hours with the mochilas trying to find a place to sleep and for the first time I really missed Israel.
The good thing is we got to see a full (dubonei ehpat li) rainbow like in cartoons....