After tearing ourselves away from Lonely Planet's "probably the best hostal in Argentina," we made our way from Trevelin to Los Alerces national park. We'd been recommended this route by a fellow English cycle tourist, Jack, and we weren't to be disappointed; it was probably my favourite stretch so far on the trip and this feeling was amplified when the "Guardaparques" informed us that we could camp next to the amazing Lago Rivadavia - half-way along the 100km stretch. On arrival at the campsite, we encountered a French filmmaker/motorcyclist who we'd met on the road several times before. He'd loved the campspot so much that he'd decided to stay there for three nights. We found out why when the sun went down and we shared a campfire with him next to the beautifully still lake. We've tried to do the place justice with the photo we just uploaded but a camera, unfortunately, can never properly capture the tranquility.

The next day we awoke to continue our journey towards San Carlos de Bariloche. As we approached the long-awaited gravel/tarmac changeover at Ruta 40, we were amused at the irony encapsulated in our all-day-long-tail-wind swinging 180 degrees to provide us with a head-wind about 3km prior to the road surface switch. This pretty much summed up the cycling conditions we'd experienced up to that point on the whole trip - never perfect! Still we were both pleased to be back on asphalt for the foreseeable future.

Bariloche is a city of around 120,000 people, which is famous for its chocolate and skiing and hence has earned the nickname "The Switzerland of Argentina." We found ourselves a hostal situated a convenient one block away from the town's all-you-can-eat restaurant (always a dream for cycle tourists!). We decided to rest there for three days and get some minor repairs carried out on our bikes after the rigours they'd been through over the last two months. We also used the time off to don our "clubbing shirts" and hit a local bar/club with Doug and Jim - two guys on their year abroad as part of their language degrees. They introduced us to "fernet" - a famous Argentinian drink, which, when combined with our 90 pence worth of red wine (this buys a surprising amount...), resulted in us horribly embarrassing ourselves with our shape on the dance floor, in addition to somehow taking two hours to complete what should have been a ten minute walk back to our accommodation!

After a day of rest and recuperation, which involved watching Argentinian cable with a load of people in our hostal, we set off for the 190km, two day cycle to San Martin de Los Andes. This took us along the scenic Ruta de Siete Lagos and involved a night of camping next to Lago Espejo where we met three guys on a weekend fishing trip from Buenos Aires. They made our day when they insisted on giving us a cooked leg of pork as a "thank you for visiting our country." Needless to say, this provided a welcome addition to our regular 500g-of-pasta-plus-sauce evening meal!

We dropped our bikes at San Martin and took a three day trip, off route, back into Chile to a place called Pucon where one can climb Mt Villaricca - a 2,900m active volcano that last erupted in 1984. The town of Pucon is built around the tourism Mt Villaricca attracts; so much so that the town's tourist information centre has a set of traffic lights outside to indicate the level of activity (and, hence, danger) exhibited by the volcano that day. We were wondering whether they would change it to red as an April Fool's joke but, fortunately, it stayed green for our one day trek up.

The day involved an early start when we met our fellow climbers, Julian and Nicole, and were handed our ice axes, crampons and gas masks (!), which were required for the ascent. Bepe, our guide, took us up the five hour climb over snow, ice and rock to a peak above the cloud level where we were told we could only stay for forty minutes due to the toxic nature of the sulphur and chlorine gases that are noisily emitted from the crater's magma. However, this was long enough for us to circle the peak and see the magma for ourselves - pretty spectacular!

For the descent, we slid down the snow ice and regions. On the third section, Bepe warned us it was possible to build up quite a lot of speed if you weren't careful. Well, I decided half-way down that it still wasn't quite exciting enough for me and attempted to liven things up by going down head first and dropping my axe; I may have looked out of control to the untrained eye, but there was certainly no need for Dave's subsequent panic wondering how he was going to catch me as he waited at the bottom! Bepe thought it was all quite funny and I think I succeeded in livening up his day.

Anyway, we're now back in San Martin to pick up our bikes ready for the next leg to Mendoza - the wine capital of Argentina.