After a few days of camping on the border of Lago Maihue in Chile, enjoying beautiful lakeside summer weather in February, we decided it was time to continue our trip down into Argentina. We drove south through Chile’s lake district, passing clear lakes, volcanoes, and pine forests. After covering most of our distance that day, it got dark and was quite late, so we stopped shortly before the border at Lago Puyehue. The lake was beautiful, and our campsite was on a little ledge on a rocky beach where all the locals were hanging out, kayaking, and playing around in the water.

After a nice breakfast in the morning, we drove up through spectacular mountain scenery to the Argentinian border. The border was generally trouble free – two relatively civilized countries were bordering here – so there were no problems with bribes, hustlers, and general disorder prevalent at borders farther north. However, we still managed to somehow lose two of our group to the Argentinian authorities. Let me explain.

First, Jono entered into the “vehicle owners only” section of the customs building and managed to procure a tourist vehicle importation permit with such ease that he jumped out of the building’s window in joy. Big mistake. Argentinian border patrol agents stopped him, confiscated the vehicle permit, and ordered him to return to his vehicle. All this for failing to properly use the door that was provided at the opposite end of the building.

Then, Nina started to cause trouble. She managed to get her camera out and got Jono’s whole ordeal on videotape. Another border patrol agent sneaked up from behind and busted her. “Hand over the video camera” he ordered. He took the camera and escorded Nina into the border control police building. Ewa and I looked at each other – there were only two out of the four of us left!

Fortunately, after some heavy apologising and correctly walking around and through the door, Jono got the importation permit back. Nina was forced to delete the video while an agent watched, and was given her camera back. With the crew back together, we drove on into Argentina.

The Argentinian side of the Lakes District is in some ways even more beautiful than the Chilean side, and we instantly felt at home as we passed beautiful lakes surrounded by pine forests with cabins and cottages on them.

We stopped at one of the first sizeable lakes, which had a nice beach with lots of locals hanging out and of blond haired kids running around. We chilled in the sun and refreshed in the cool water while we looked up at the snow on the mountains around us.

Since we’ve again been camping for well over a week now, we decided that as we got into Bariloche, the first major town en route, it was a good time to get a hotel for a night to get cleaned up and get some internet. Bariloche is the main town in the area for Argentinians coming to vacation on the lakes, but fortunately the summer season had just ended so most of the crowds were gone while the weather was still spectacular. We found a cool little hotel in an older, run-down European style, and went out for some delicious Argentinian steak (appropriately on our first night in the country).

After getting some time to catch up on e-mails in the morning overlooking the lake, we decided to drive south. However, passing lake after lake in the beautiful sunshine we couldn’t help but stop to take a dip.

Later that afternoon, we kept driving south, now following Argentina’s famous Ruta 40 (Highway 40), which follows the western edge of the country. For a few hours the road kept winding through pine forests and lakes, but then dropped off into the Patagonian pampas. The terrain became flatter, with more rolling hills, and much drier. Rivers were replaced by dry arroyos and the pine trees with little scrub bushes. Cattle fences and the occasional little house were the only things we could see. As it got dark, we drove off the highway and up a hill on what was definitely neither a road nor a track (actually more like a sheep path) and stopped to cook our own version of an awesome Argentinian garlic mushroom pot roast. It was absolutely delicious, partly due to our camp cooking skills but also to the excellent chunk of Patagonian beef we had acquired. Meanwhile we hid from the wind and checked out the horizon still lit from the sunset, and contemplated the next two thousand kilometres of Patagonian road we still had ahead of us on the way to Tierra del Fuego.