Over the Andes

This post is liberally and randomly dotted with pretty pictures in dubious chronological order, as I can't remember which is from where.

We got from Mendoza to Santiago by way of coach, taking the winding road over the Andes mountains.  The terminal in Mendoza is a bit demented - 40 bus ranks, countless offices for bus and tour firms, money changers, water and empanada sellers etc..  More alarmingly, our bus wasn't on the departure schedule.  The bod in the ticket office helpfully drew a circle around the departure time on my printed-off voucher, which did little to assuage my doubts about the coach's actual existence.   Ultimately a bus did turn up, and we handed our bags over to the porter loading the luggage bay - along with half my surplus pesos for his trouble. They don't work for the bus companies, they just work for tips.  Anyone handling the bodybags when they've not been calibrated for domestic flight deserves my groats.

We had booked our seats ahead of time and had managed to reserve two at the top and front.  If you're making a trip as dramatic as this one, you want the view.  Our compatriots in the other two front seats were a friendly and chatty Irish bloke who was resident in Buenos Aires and therefore spoke a helpful amount of Spanish, and a middle-aged American guy who was pleasant enough but was also perhaps not entirely there.  He had the perpetual open-mouthed grin of the recently sedated or of serial killers. I think perhaps that the wheel was turning but the hamster was likely dead. 

The border is an adventure in endurance bureaucracy.  It looks even worse if you're doing it by car -we saw tailbacks for an easy three miles.  We had it easy by comparison in that the buses just drove around the cars and queue up outside a large hanger.  Bus by bus we disembarked and joined a spider of lines leading to desks variously staffed by Argentine and Chilean immigration staff.  The idea was that you got signed out by the Argies and stamped in by the Chileans.  It worked after a fashion.

Then we were paraded into another room with sinister looking metal table and a massive x-ray machine.  There we laid out any carry-on bags and waited while they dragged off our luggage from the bus and ran it through the machine.  We were in attendance in case they wanted to look inside.  Meanwhile, they go over the bus with a fine toothed comb and a team of very distractable dogs.  The point of all of this is partially to look for the normal contraband, but mainly to stop the import of biological matter like diary, meat, plants and untreated wood.  They're serious about it too.  Non of the various paramilitary-looking constabularies and government agents we've encountered in South America look half as geared up for war as the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture.

After a modest hour and a bit (the bus companies allow something like 1-3 hours for the border crossing on their schedule), we were back on our way.  At this point they passed around a hat for tips for the guys who handled our bags at border control.  I was prepped for this, so they got got the other half of my Argie monopoly money.  It's best to lose that benighted currency before you reach civilisation.

You have one job and you suck at it

On the other side,  the road winds perilously around sheer drops a dozen or so times.  This is made all the more fun by being on a duble-decker coach.  The scenery is spectacular on the way through; white peaks and rivers of snow melt all around.

As the scenery gets a bit more conventional once you've reached the bottom, they play a couple of films on the bus TV screens.  They played that new National Lampoon's film, which I'm pretty sure isn't on general release.  Their copy had Spanish subtitles overlaid on top of Chinese subtitles, which meant one of the staff had plainly Bittorrented it on his down time.  

The bus terminal in Santiago was another level of ridiculous. It was 20 coaches crammed into the space of 8, all of whom apparently on a mission to be the biggest possible obstacle. I'll talk more about Santiago in a bit because we're coming back here after a brief stint in the Atacama desert.   

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Wir überquerten die Anden mit dem Bus. Der Kerl, der neben mir saß, war vielleicht ein bisschen dumm.
Die Aussicht war wunderschön, aber die Grenze Bürokratie war lächerlich.