Esquel

Hostelling in Argentina has been super comfortable, friendly, and fun. The first hostel that we stayed in was in Esquel. This was also our first glimpse of the Andes. We hope to see much more. Esquel is a small mountain town in Patagonia and without a traffic signal. It’s a ski town in the winter (June, July, August.) In the summer, it’s a little quieter, with people coming to hike in the mountains and swim in the lake.

Our hostel was called Casa del Pueblo. A hostel is defined as a place where you can stay, which also has an equipped kitchen ready to use, some common area to hang around in, and access to the internet. Most of them have a choice of shared dorm rooms or private rooms with private bathrooms. Most of the guests show up with backpacks.

We immediately felt at home. We were greeted by a chica from France,  Aline, who showed us our room and gave us a tour. The kitchen was the center of activity in Casa del Pueblo. The following day was rainy, so we went shopping and cooked up a big pot of black bean soup for everyone. It was very fun for us to cook in the kitchen, and a treat for everyone, including us, to sit around the table later that afternoon with bread, wine, and soup.

Flávia is on the far left. She is an astronomy student from Brasil. She especially enjoyed it, because black beans are part of the Brasilian culture, and in Argentina, nobody eats beans. For Virginia, who lives in Esquel, it was the first time ever eating beans. They eat meat in Argentina. In the hostel, we met people from France, Australia, Germany, Belgium, Argentina, and a couple from Alberta who were traveling around the world.

I also had the chance to bake some bread. This really endeared us to the place. Our old friend Lief once told us, “In any community, carpenters and bakers are always welcome.”We shared a few more meals, but by far the most impressive one was Empanada Night. Empanadas might be considered Argentina’s national food, because they are everywhere, every day. They are little meat or vegetable or chicken turnovers, filling wrapped around with dough, then baked.

Natalia is the owner of the hostel, and she has friends who like to drop by. On this evening, Maxy (Maximiliano) and his wife Florencia came by with their friend Gustavo. They went shopping for ingredients, returned to the hostel with a mountain of meat and vegetables, and eighty rounds of empanada dough. “Team work,” they said. It is fun to be a part of a group, working together on a big project.

Making eighty empanadas is a big project, like making a ton of tamales. The first thing you do is open some wine bottles, the cut the meat into little pieces, chop the vegetables, and then cook them on a big disco. A disco is a disk from a tractor, that’s used to plow the fields. Heavy steel. They’re used over really hot fires and they can stand the heat. Here is Maxy showing Mike how it’s done. After everything was cooked, we filled the dough, pinched it together, baked them, and ate them. There was still some filling left after we filled all eighty empanadas, so Natalia quickly whipped up some more dough for a tarta. Lots of good cheer, lots of good food, everything still going strong at midnight. El Parque Nacional Alerces is close to Esquel. It’s a national park with lakes, rivers, hiking trails, and glaciers. Alerces are a type of cypress tree, and there is one specific tree that’s more than 4500 years old, one of the oldest living things on the planet. We didn’t go to see it, because you have to take a boat ride of a few hours, and we preferred to hike in the forest.

We went there on two separate days. A local bus takes you there in the morning, and brings you back in the evening. The first day, we hiked along the shore of Lake Futalaufquen.The next time, two days later, it was a beautiful sunny day, and we went a little further into the park, to enjoy the forest and the water. We sat on the shore of Lake Menendez, and looked at the glacier in the distance, and we hiked along El Rio Arellanes. A perfect day in the forest.

Late in the afternoon, after hiking a bit and a nap, we walked up to the road, and then flagged down the bus to take us back home to the hostel.