I´m melting to the seat El Bolson, Argentina

The cabaña on the corner of Feliciano and Anden. It has a sign saying "Cabaña por dia." 40 pesos x person.

We have arrived to Argentina in the middle of summer. They say the heat was worse about a month ago (with temperatures reaching 100 degrees ) but what we caught of the heat was enough for us.

"I think I´ve melted into the seat" That´s what I said as we pulled up to the one room bus station in El Bolson. We were in a microwave on wheels and had become part of the bus seat from our 2 hour tanning booth quality direct sunlight.

El Bolson is a nice little town in the lakes district of Argentina. It´s full of sparkling rivers and lakes, dark green forests, dry rocky mountains and a bosque tallado (a forest full of trees sculpted by artists), cold lakes and a $10 all you can eat buffet, which we took advantage of our first night.

In our many days in El Bolson we spent most of them catching up with our Copacabana friend Fernando, hanging out in the full-of-hippies-and-handicrafts central plaza, movie watching (because of the intense heat and later rain) and cooking.

Maybe you remember our friend Fernando (he´s one of the interesting, spiritual, gem and nature loving hippies we wrote about in our La Paz & Copacabana, Bolivia travels.) He has been traveling around selling rings and other fine jewelry treasures at handicraft festivals around Argentina. He´s been traveling south in Argentina and we´ve been traveling south in Chile. It worked out just right to reunite and catch up in El Bolson. He acted as our more-or-less helpful tour guide. Though due to his and my bad orientation, we did do the forced march in 90 degree weather for a few hours before deciding we had passed what we were looking for and decided to head back. We revived ourselves from the heat by dipping our feet in a nearby river. :)

The central park/plaza in El Bolson was really the place to be any time of day. At whatever hour you could find clown performances, crazy dancers, jugglers, slow motion yoga demonstrations, independent writers passing out their newest creations, rock bands, drum circles and Lori playing her drum. We spent some serious time here doing rigorous people watching.

We had a nice cabaña for the three of us which, as Fernando had been in Argentina for a while, was very uncommon. It would be our first and last non-dormitory style lodging. (Dormitory meaning lots of beds in one room occupied by different people each night.)

Being that we had the whole cabaña to ourselves, we tried all 5 of the recipes we know (our Ecuadorian rice and eggs plate would be recipe 6... we won´t count that.) This included experimenting with our version of Mr.Nardacci´s famous meatballs, which though they didn´t come out very ball like, were 5 star. Definitely up to Mr.Nardacci´s taste standards.

We decided to continue our travels in the North of Argentina and Fernando on his way south. hopefully our paths will cross again. In the mean time we boarded our mobile home for the next 20 hours and got ready for Mendoza.