People and animals struggle to cool down in Bariloche, a tourist town in Patagonia, a normally cold and windy region in Argentina's far south, where a heatwave has brought record temperatures that exceeded 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in the southern hemisphere summer. "These hot days are very atypical in our region. It was many years ago that there was such a big heat wave," says Nelson Leal, the operations manager of Bariloche's Fire Prevention and Fire Fighting Service. Two provinces have declared states of emergency due to fire risk until April, as firefighters continue to battle an "out of control" blaze in a national park, struggling to keep it from reaching two nearby towns. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES