The long, long, long, road to Chile...

The trip from Mendoza to Santiago is supposed to be a fairly straight forward 7 hour journey - which it`s worth doing during the day to experience the drive through the Andes.

Except that`s not how it ended up working out.

I got to the bus station at 10:00 for a 10:30 set off, and got my seat - upstairs right at the front of the bus.

An hour into the journey, the bus pulls off the road onto a patch of gravel, and the driver appears and announces something in Spanish - non of which I, or the two guy`s from London who were sat next to me could understand.

So everyone gets off the bus, and it turns out that one of the belts has broken in the engine and we aren`t going anywhere.

So we hang around for over an hour until a new bus arrives, and after they move all of the luggage from one bus to the other we set off.

Here`s a picture of the broken down bus, and the incredible view of the mountains:





The road goes through the Andes, climbing the mountains, through some really dramatic scenery. I took loads of pics, a sample of which are below.

I sat next to a nice old Argentinian lady and we got talking (kind of) given that her English and my Spanish were just about on the same level. But she kept pointing stuff out and telling me what it was - which was kind of cool, and I could just about follow what she was telling me.

Rather bizarrely she did say that as I was English and she was Argentinian - and then she held up her fists with a serious face and then started laughing. Kind of weird, but I knew what she meant.

One of my favourite Silverchair songs contains the word Andes, and it got stuck in my head the whole journey (which is better than having Rick Astely going around). You can hear it here.

Close to the edge, down by the river:

















This bridge marks the border between Argentina and Chile (note the little blue sign on the right) - this is the Argentinian side:



And this is Chile:



The border:



The scary road down - no barriers, and the everyone has to drive really realy near to the edge:



Chile:



Because of the hour`s delay, we get to customs late, and it take over two hours to get through. After about an hour, we get the passport stamps, and then we all have to get back on the bus, wait almost an hour, before being herded off and go through customs, which included having all the bags x-rayed).

We were also at high altitude, and which didn`t help, and I was really hungry so picked up a really bad sandwhich.

We ended up pulling into Santiago at just before 10pm - more than four hours behind schedule.