Esquel - Patagonia

Yet another treking paradise, with the National Park only 50kms away. We decided to stay for 5 nights. A hard steep 2 hour walk to the top of the Mountain with the Cross gives fantastic views of the town and surrounding mountains. We enjoyed sitting at the top for an hour with our lunch and taking it all in. And of course it was so much easier on the way down. We did another walk to the Lake via dirt roads (but thought this rather a boring way)so enjoyed using the compass to take a different way back, following fence lines and land marks, i.e. Mountain of the Cross. We took the bus into the National Park and then onto Lago Verde - Green Lake, which had a beautiful Mirador - look out. We thought there would be heaps of easy to follow hiking tracks, but unfortunately more research would have told us that not only were there not heaps of walking tracks, but also that they were not easy to find (even with the NP maps). We therefore hitch hiked back the 25kms (1 hour) to the entrance of the Park with a ranger, got confused by the tourist information we were then given, took a small walk to another Mirador, and then waited for an hour to hitch hike back the hour to where we were staying. The reason for all the hitch hiking was because the bus, which only runs 3 times a week during this time of the season, does not pick you back up until 7.45pm, and we were over it by 4pm and did not want to wait it out. The weather was drizzly and no tea houses were open. We caught a ride with a French tourist. We had resorted to flashing our block of chocolate to all the cars that went by, in the hope that someone loved the idea of eating some. We had actually wanted to stay the night in the Park, however, the timing of the limited buses and our bus onto our next destination just did not work. In the high season though the buses run every day. A 30 minute bus ride away is a very small Welsh town called Trevelin, which was founded in 1922. We went for a couple of hours, and it really did not need any more than that. Apart from a couple of museums, this is the place you would go to really get away from it all, to stay in a Cabana, or camp, and maybe take in a spot of fly fishing. The Lonely Planet talks about lots of tea houses and cakes. Most eating places were unfortunately closed when we wanted lunch about 3.30pm, on a week day.