Today’s post will be short and sweet as not much happened.  We left by bus from Puerto Varas in Argentina, a picturesque patagonian vacation town in Chile, for Bariloche, what we hear is a picturesque patagonian vacation town in Argentina!

Nothing too exciting during the long bus ride through the Andes other than some of the views:

And after a few more hours we got a glimpse of Bariloche across the lake:

And once we finally reached the omnibus station in Bariloche, we were met with a 2 mile walk to our hostel… But at least these were the views we had along the way!

The rest of the day involed a long ordeal in trying to get Argentinian Pesos. Our first obvious option was to go to an ATM, but, unfortunately we soon found out that the ATMs limit withdrawals to a max of $150 per transaction, plus charge a $10 fee per transaction, which we would then add our own bank’s $5 fee per international transaction, on top of another 3% fee for using a non-bank ATM… Obviously these fees started to add up quickly ($10+$5+$4.5(3%) = ~$20 fee per each $150 withdrawal!!!) so this was discouraging. The bad part is that Argentina is a very cash heavy country (distrust in credit) so getting cash was a must, especially since our hostel only took cash as payments. Fortunately we ran across this company called Xoom, a paypal subsidiary, which had a much more reasonable ~3% fee for changing USD into Argentinian Pesos so we finally ended up with cash in hand and the day ended up exhausting but all okay!