Mendoza to Santiago, through the Andes

Wednesday, April 8 – Day 113

I took the bus to Santiago, which is an 8 to 10 hour ride. I chose to do this trip during the day because I wanted to see the Andes. The one way fare was about US$12.00.

It’s hard to get a sense of scale, but as you can imagine, everything here is huge. We drove by Cerro Aconcagua, which, at 7,000 meters (about 21,000 feet), is the highest peak outside of the Himalayas. Unfortunately, it was on the other side of the bus, so I didn’t get a good picture of it.

We drove uphill for the first four hours, then downhill for the last four hours. Roughly half way through the trip, we made our way into Chile through a rather bleak and cold border crossing. I think that they just play with the tourists for entertainment as it took us about 2 hours to clear customs. The weirdest part was that the Chilean authorities videotaped everybody as we got back on the bus.

We went through a number of the yellow “tunnels” you see in one of the pictures. These protective structures were built many years ago, and only became tunnels after rock slides covered them over. If you look closely at some of the other pictures, you can get a sense of scale by noticing how small some of the roads and other vehicles are.