more lakes

Today - a long day - I was picked up way before dawn (mind you, dawn isn't until 8 50 or so, Bariloche being so far south), and then headed north to San Martin de los Andes, a really lovely little town, via the Seven Lakes.  There are, of course, a while lot more than seven, and I felt very sorry for the tiny ones, as big (or as small) as Queenmere on Wimbledon Common, which clearly don't count at all.  And then there were plenty of autumnal landscapes looking like Millais paintings.

I learned a surprising amount about lakes today: the ones that rivers flow into; the ones that flow into each other; the ones that are self contained.

Small patches of autumn;

and larger ones (again, one could be forgiven for thinking one were in Scotland).

This was my favorite: Lago Falkner (Tomas Falkner seems to have been a fascinating man: born in Liverpool in 1702 and died in Shropshire in 1784; was initially a Calvinist but studies medicine in Cordoba; became a Jesuit missionary in Patagonia; managed not to get massacred; and went back to Cordoba to teach mathematics for 11 years; was a competent botanist; went to Cadiz, Italy, and back to England where he wrote a Description of Patagonia).  We weren't actually told this: Wikipedia was hastily consulted just now ...

This is a young Chimango hawk.

more autumn;

and sometimes, you're just very thankful you opted to go on a minibus tour, so that someone else could do all the driving and you could look at the views, and not be worrying about obstacles in the road (at another point, there were a lot of sheep).