Handcuffs, rain, and tourism

I left Valdivia, I left behind, as always, someone that I will miss. I got the bus to Osorno and from their a comfy, double decker bus to Bariloche Argentina.

The boarder guard sits down with the poorly stamped passport in his hand. He looks sorry, regretful. "Do you have a spouse here?"
"No...why?"
"Well, we are going to have to solve this some way..." He reaches over to his friend´s waist and pulls out a set of handcuffs saying, "this will solve the problem." And then he laughs and tells me he is only joking.

A scare. I was malinformed when I first arrived in Santiago so I had a resident permit but not my resident number (the final step) So I left Chile 3 days after I was supposed to (3 months would have been Feb 13 and I left Feb 16) so, thinking he was doing me a favour the Chilean boarder guard stamped my passport with Feb 13. So when I arrived on the night of february 16 at the Argentine boarder, they asked me when I left chile and I had to tell them that very day... causing more problems...

Later at the end at 1030pm I met an Australian/French couple and an American guy - none of us had Argentine dollars at the bus station at this time, outside the city of Bariloche - after some negotiation we payed the cab in Chilean pesos and we began looking around in this apparently touristy town for a hostel. This fact was confirmed: we walked for 2 hours and asked at every single hostel - all were full; it was raining, we were tired and it was the next day... we finally woke a woman up who rented rooms, only after having contemplated accompanying the drunk and homeless in the central park under some trees, and trespassing on private property... in the end we paid the 15$ each for a less than satisfactory room...

Bariloche is like Pucón in that it crawls, especially at this time of year, with tourists from Europe and North America. Off-putting. But again, it is touristy for a reason. So yesterday I took the half-hour bus trip to Cerro Catedral ski centre at about 1000m. (It used to be the biggest ski centre in South America but has been overtaken by one in Mendoza Ar. and various in Chile in the last decade.) When I left, with my American companion Jeff, it was windy and cloudy with sun peaking through like spotlights to illuminate the rocky peaks and the specks of snow that remain from the summer, and to glisten off the massive glacial lake.
I was wearing tights and a tshirt and had a rainjacket and long underwear layer in my bag along with water and some food. I ran the trail, that ran 10km along the edge of the mountain, looking down on a river and two glacial lakes in the midst of towering rocky peaks, through a burn and up up up to a rock and wood refugio above the treeline. The last three kilometres began to rain and get much colder, and when i got to the Refugio I was wet and quickly became cold. I drank and ate and sat among the dirty climbing and mountaineering bums in the refugio, playing cards and drinking mate. The rain reached torrential status and then backed off - I took this opportunity to start my 10km descent. The rain only increased and the steep sections became very dangerous to walk let alone run. In the end I probably ran about 3/5 of the 20km and the other 2/5 were a brisk walk or an almost crawl on the slippery mud... that was yesterday... today I am sore but have escaped Bariloche and my penthouse hostel with panoramic views to come to this campground in El Bolson, an area renowned for its hippies and its lowkeyness - it still has a touristy feel but is much smaller and lacks the glitz and the polish. (streets, save three, are unpaved) My campground is at the foot of a huge rocky ridge of mountains that rises behind me to block out the sun and accross the river and the small town another ridge of mountains, the Andes, runs, snowspeckled into the distance...
Thats where I´m at now
ciao