Last Saturday to Tuesday, which was April 5-8, we took our visa activation trip to Mendoza. The timing was perfect, as we needed to leave Chile; our 90 days on our tourist visa expired on April 8th. And since we received our Temporary Residence Stamps last week, we needed to activate those within 90 days. So, we decided to take a trip to Mendoza, which is the easiest "big" city in Argentina to get to from Chile.
We decided to take the bus, which is an 8 hour ride, for a couple of reasons. 1. We were too late in planning to buy an affordable plane ticket. 2. It would have been close to the same travel time anyways as flying. 3. The route takes you over the Andes mountains, and you even get to see Mt. Aconcagua, which is the highest mountain in South America. 4. The boys love a good double decker bus. So away we went. The drive really was impressive. On the Chilean side, you go up a nice valley that feels reasonable and picturesque. There is a train track that goes the majority of the way up the valley as well, and you can see in the photo below how it weaves through tunnels alongside the river we were following.
Quite quickly, the road goes from reasonable to suddenly unreasonable, and you start going up switchback after switchback that take you up several thousand feet in not alot of distance. There are alot of semis going up this pass, and at one point, a semi in front of our bus started struggling really bad, going so slow that our bus actually stopped completely, and this made us stall. Somehow, our driver managed to start the bus back up and start moving forward again without the bus rolling back at all. I was having a mini-panic attack at this point but was very impressed with his driving skills to keep us going. Below is the screenshot of the google map showing all the turns, and below that is what it looked like in real life.
At the top of the switch backs is the Portillo Ski Resort, which is the yellow building in the photo below. It's supposed to be quite lovely, as it's right on a lake. Driving up those switchbacks in the winter time though would be a mission.
This photo below is near the top of the pass, right before we go into a 2-mile tunnel through the highest point of the pass that is technically the split between Chile and Argentina. They don't do any of the immigration in the tunnel though, for obvious reasons, so we drove through the tunnel and down another 10 minutes before we stopped at a building to go through Argentinian immigration. The Chilean immigration building for the opposite direction was before the tunnel, and when we drove past it on Saturday, there was a line of cars about 2 miles long waiting to go through. They were at a stand still; people were getting out the their cars and walking around. We were expecting to wait in a similar line when we came back through on Tuesday, but for whatever reason, we got super lucky, and there was no line at all! We breezed right into the main immigration building on the way back. I guess that's the difference between a Saturday and a Tuesday? Dunno.
On the Argentinian side, after you go through the tunnel but before immigration, you can see Mt. Aconcagua, which is the snowy peak in the pic below. The pic doesn't do it justice at all; it looked very impressive.
Once you're through immigration, you basically drive out a long valley that follows a different river on the other side of the divide. It was hard to imagine, but this side of the Andes was even drier than the Chilean side. We followed this slopping mesa down to the town of Uspallata, which looked very quaint, a little valley nestled amongst the mountains. Then you go through one more river gorge, and finally come out on the plains of Mendoza. It felt very much like driving down to Denver. Once you get there, the land is relatively flat, dry, and the mountains are in the west. The world makes sense again! Next blog on the city itself!
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