Easter Island Adventure - Over the Andes

11 Nov 2017 . category: Travel . Comments
#EasterIsland

Day 7: Over the Andes!

We got up bright and early to take a bus from Santiago to Mendoza, just over the border with Argentina. From there, we would fly to Buenos Aires. Why subject ourselves to this bus journey instead of directly flying? Well, the ride through the Andes is supposed to be absolutely beautiful. This blogger described it as “one of the most memorable parts of our trip and…a day of sites that were postcard-worthy.” So we made sure to buy our tickets on the first day they became available, securing the top two seats on the upper level.

The bus station itself was less chaotic than we feared, given what we’d read on the internet beforehand. Note that Santiago confusingly has several different bus stations, some (but not all) of which are next to each other, so make sure to go to the right one. The process of boarding our bus on the other hand, was much less peaceful. Despite the general lack of tourists in Santiago, I for some reason had still expected the bus to be a mix of locals and foreigners. But it instead seemed to be almost wholly composed of people moving their entire worldly possessions between Chile and Argentina. There was massive chaos in trying to get everyone’s bags, boxes, suitcases, etc. onto the bus. Someone later mentioned that due to the weakness of one currency relative to another, it’d become financially advantageous to shop across the border, so perhaps that was it? Regardless, there was one poor over-stressed employee trying to load everyone’s bags on as people jockied around him in both mass- and line-like shapes. But we finally managed to make it onto the bus, and departed around 40 minutes late. I’d left a bit of a buffer between our bus’ arrival in Mendoza and our departing flight due to the uncertainties of the bording crossing, so hopefully we would be okay?

The first hour or two of the ride was pretty uneventful, just getting to the Andes themselves. So unsurprisingly we both fell asleep. But at some point, I awoke and observed us pull off the highway and park on the side of some random road. I was a bit perplexed, had our bus broken down in some way? But soon I noticed many other large buses doing the same exact thing. After quite a long period of confusion (it didn’t seem like there were even announcements in Spanish), we gathered that the mountain pass was temporarily closed due to bad weather. As this was November in Chile (the equivalent of May in the Northern Hempishere), I was a bit surprised. At some point, the driver contemplated turning back, but the bus collectively loudly opposed this, so we continued to sit and wait. We ended up waiting for about two hours overall, by the end of which I was hoping we would turn back. Had we continued at that point, we would’ve missed our onward flight (one of the last out of Mendoza) and been stranded for the evening without accomodation. Thankfully, the bus drivers seemed to all decide at once to turn back, so we headed on back to Santiago. On the journey back, I attempted to buy last-minute Santiago -> Buenos Aires flights, but despite trying several credit cards and expensive foreign phone calls with Chase, our charges kept getting denied. So we instead went directly to the airport, and purchased our flights at the Sky Airline counter. My first (and hopefully only) time buying tickets at the airport. Thankfully, they weren’t too expensive, yay for low cost carriers! We proceeded to camp out in an airport lounge for the next several hours (with unlimited smoked salmon!), not wanting to do anything else for the day.

The flight itself was uneventful, but our upgrade luck had run out, as we ended up in the non-reclining very last row with discount-airline legroom. At least the cabin was covered with ads!

But given the flight’s duration, it didn’t really matter. And we were just thankful to have made it to Buenos Aires without any delay (albeit having missed out on our Andes views). This was really one of the most depressing travel days I’ve ever done, but hopefully the last two days of our vacation would be better!

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