Saturday 28 October 1995

We bought food for the next three days just in case we could not get any on the way - cans of tuna and corned beef, smoked salmon, crackers, chocolate, fruit and empanadas. Bariloche has a great number of chocolate shops and it is easy to find a good selection. The very air in Bariloche is permeated with the smell of chocolate; chocoholics would be in heaven here.
We left Bariloche at 13:00 on a charter train to Ingeniero Jacobacci. The land quickly becomes dry and we saw hares breaking cover, rheas, cattle and many tero (a bird that flies like a lapwing but makes a great noise). The trip was very pleasant in an excellent train. Because there were very few hotel rooms in town, about half of the group slept on the train and they might have had different feelings about it.

Bariloche

There were several runpasts with the last being at the junction of the narrow gauge to Esquel. From here the line is dual gauge for some 23 km into Ingeniero Jacobacci. We got out to examine this oddity which was the reason for which so many of us had traveled halfway around the world. It is a switch with no moving parts set in the desert with the signals by the side and a small station and yard a little way away.

Left - the junction: right - giving kids Operstion Lifesaver Pins

Ingeniero Jacobacci

We were up at 04:30 and Colin managed to get a good hot shower before the rest of the hotel started to shower and the water went lukewarm. The tiny bathroom had no shower curtains, so once the shower was turned on, everything in the room got soaked. The hotel offered, unexpectedly, a continental breakfast which we took before going over to our train. We found comfortable seats in the Old Patagonian Express and were ready to leave by 06:00. It was cold outside but not too bad and the small stove in the car made things very cozy. One fellow took on the task of keeping the fire fed and burning nicely until the sun rose and warmed everything up.
It was getting light as we left Ingeniero Jacobacci and we watched several small flights of ducks take off. After the junction with the broad gauge to Bariloche the land becomes drier and there were many hairs to be seen breaking cover. As the sun came up we had our first run past which was wonderful in the horizontal light. Every so often we saw a group of bleached bones. Colin collected cow chips to burn in the stove. Colin was trapped in the toilet and was fortunate to have his toolkit with him.

Baldwin #3 did well and we got to Cerro Mesa where #19 was waiting to take us forward to El Maiten. Cerro Mesa is an oasis of green trees in a brown and yellow desert. There is a river flowing through the village which has salmon. To make money for the local school, volunteers at the school had put on a continental breakfast to which several people went out of a sense of duty because it was around 11:30. The volunteers were disappointed with the turnout but when there are active trains shunting around the railway yard, the hard cores can't be expected to walk away from them to drink coffee. Lunch was supposed to be provided by a man with a brown coat but this does not turn up until very late in the afternoon at El Maiten and then was very expensive. A woman and a couple of children were selling pastries on the platform- dulce de leche scones and delicious bastilitos which will fine pastry with honey enclosing some jam - a little bit like wontons. The little girl selling them usee tonges to get them out of the basket.

Cerro Mesa

#19 took us on to El Maiten with very few stops, There are some fierce grades and we were down to walking pace in a couple of places. We stopped for water at a small station and found a couple of men on horses who posed for our gaucho shots. It was quite a performance.

First the train arrives, then the gauchos

Two gauchos or one?

The approach to El Maiten was magical. We came down a fairly steep hill overlooking a broad green valley where the trees were in new leaf. The snow covered mountains formed the perfect backdrop for the typical angry evening sky. Some of the fields appeared completely yellow with dandelions and there was some standing water. Horses were grazing in the fields and several were running loose.
At El Maiten we had a choice of leaving the train and going to Esquel directly. We followed the route of the train which appeared minuscule in the wide large valley. The hotel at Esquel was pretty good although a little noisy because of a fashion show that was being staged in the restaurant.
We found an excellent trattoria. Mary fancied gnocchi with roquefort sauce, none of which was on the menu but which the kitchen was able to produce. The restaurant was run by a man who wanted to be a magician and who loved children. He kept bringing us puzzles to solve. It was a pleasant evening which was rounded off with a couple of bottles of beer and flan de casa con dulce de leche. We rolled out of there looking for mineral water, which we quickly found in the shop and then headed back to the hotel.

Monday 30 October 1995

Today we rode from Esquel to El Maiten. It took some time to put our train together which was a freight train with a passenger train behind. There were two locomotives, #4 (Baldwin) and the #114 (Henschel). Esquel is set against a dramatic backdrop of mountains. The winds were very high as we left town. We saw several flights of scarlet ibis as well as some black necked swans. Many of the railway buildings are made from ties (sleepers), probably because this was the only building material available. Mary had a close encounter with a barbed wire fence which left two long bloody scratches above her right knee and a big hole in her pants. Barbara Hannah provided some antibiotic ointment and bandages which Mary ministered to her scratches, and then sewed up the hole in her pants.

Many railway buildings were construcvted from ties (sleepers)

Adrian Pardo from Buenos Aires subsequently wrote the following post on the internet.
“I want to add my 10 cents..
“There was a Swiss-French guy, Danielle, on the tour who stayed on the train from El Maiten to Esquel and at a stop at 10:00 p.m. he got out of the train, stood with one foot in each rail (75 cm gauge), dropped his pants and began a deposition. The train began to move and so he grabbed his pants and chased the train.
“Next morning he told us his adventure and said that he lost his passport and credit card at that stop.
“In the trip back I was riding the cab and stopping in every possible place looking for a mountain of sh.. and some documents - and the engineer found them. In the middle of nowhere there was a mountain and all his documents.
“Believe it or not a true story.”
It seems the site of the deposition was the lasy runpast and the engineer was instructed to look for excrement at that location

The two trains were split at Lepa and Colin rode the head end of #4 from there to Leleque. The engineer ran with no vacuum while we were climbing a steep grade and only opened the vacuum brake for the descent.

Leleque

Once again the arrival at El Maiten was quite dramatic with an angry sky and a setting sun against the mountains. We took buses to El Bolson but there was complete chaos sorting everyone out and their baggage to the correct hotel. We arrived after 10:00 and had been told that there would be no dinner provided, which was fine because we didn't want to eat that late, but just wanted to get to our room. Instead upon arrival suddenly it was announced that dinner was provided after all and we wouldn't be going to the hotels until later. Colin said he had a “medical problem" and had to get to the hotel, so after a long wait, the few of us who wanted to skip dinner were bussed with our luggage to the five hotels while the rest of the group ate dinner. Part of the delay was caused by the fact that our bus driver didn't know how to get to our hotel, so the hotel had to send someone out to show him the way. Eventually we made it into our little cottage on the ranch outside of town and fell into bed after ministering to those barbed wire scratches. The pants got ditched and didn't make it home.

Tuesday 31 October 1995

We decided to go directly by taxi to Bariloche rather than go with a group to Cerro Mesa and then return to Bariloche this gave us some time to spare at the ranch which was set on the side of a valley some way out of El Bolson. There were a couple of t eros on the grounds and they had evidently a nest. As we approached they made a lot of noise, then would watch us intensely and shout out only when we moved. One of the hotel dogs took us for a walk along the road behind the hotel. We passed an apple orchard which was for sale. The trees were in full bloom and we wondered whether it would make a retirement home for us. The place was very peaceful and we could hear the ibis honking in the valley below. (Shades of Linden Lee)

El Bolson

The taxi worked well. A total of four vehicles took us all to Bariloche . They went in convoy and kept in touch by two-way radio. The road has been improved and is now well engineered although there is still much surfacing to be done. The journey took less than 2 hours and this is quite an improvement on a couple of years ago.
We rested up when we got to the hotel and went out for a late lunch at a vegetarian restaurant. This was a surprising find in the Argentinian macho society and most of the patrons were women who seem to be there because of the handsome waiter who did lots of kissing of female customers. It was a fixed three course meal which was very good. The definition of vegetarian seemed to be a little stretched as it included seafood, eggs and cheese.
We had a short walk around the town and watched the photographers in the square with a St. Bernard puppy. There was a party on the beach and two young men actually went into the lake which must have been very cold. The dogs in this town seem to lie in the most unusual and awkward places. One was sleeping in the entrance to a pizza parlor so that the patrons would have to stop over it in order to get in.
Dinner was at Parada 1810 which Colin had visited on his first trip. It was very good. Colin had lomo (filet mignon) and mushrooms while Mary had soup and a salad. This was washed down with a good bottle of Argentinian wine.
On the way back to the hotel Mary picked up La Nacion, the newspaper out of Buenos Aires, and in the hotel we tuned into Radio Canada International to get news about the Quebec referendum. La Nacion had a very good article about the lead-up to the referendum, but no results yet. We already knew the results because a lot of people in the group were very interested in the referendum, had monitored the shortwave radio and watched CNN.