Jannis & Martine

Five days ago we arrived in Santiago, so now we are in Chili again.

Before we moved back to Chili we first went from Argentine´s holiday place for the ordinary rich, Bariloche, to Argentine´s holiday´s place for the extreme rich, San Martin. Between these two places is the famous ´Seven Lakes´ route, so we booked an ordinary bus which did this route in under 5 hours, by driving like a madman along curving dry sand covered mountain roads.

A very beautifull, but also a little terrifying experience…

The village of San Martin is purpose built in a beautifull valley for Argentine´s rich and famous, so it really doesn´t look and feel as a South-American place at all, as all houses look like little Austrian/Swiss-designed holiday villa´s, the roads are without holes, and its is prefectly clean everywhere. Even our hostel was a bit out of the ordinary as we not only had a very beautifully designed & very clean private room with a view onto the mountains; we also had a very nice private bathroom. Something we had not seen since we left Buenos Aires, two months ago.

All in all, San Martin was a very good place to recover a bit from our little extreme horsebackriding, cycling, hiking and bus experiences. Having recovered some, we also did some more hiking during the last days of our stay. One day we did a very nice trip to, it is said, one of the most beautifull mountains in the world: the Lanin vulcan. As this vulcan is located nearby San Martin, we took the opportunity to visit this vulcano via a combined ´bus-ride/hike/bus-ride´-trip. As ´nearby´ out here means anything located less than 200 kilomers away, this resulted in an exhausting, but nice, 12-hour long daytrip.

After having rested a bit, we left San Martin to cross the Andes mountains again. The first part of this ride involved crossing the Andes mountains via a very beautifull route, which included leaving the Argentinian border very close to the backside of the…

…Lanin vulcano.

Seeing the (snowless) backside of the vulcano while waiting at the Argentinian/Chilean border, was certainly a somewhat different experience than doing a long 12-hour ´bus-ride/hike/bus-ride´-trip to visit its (somewhat more beautifull snow covered) frontside…

Another problem at this border crossing is that you are not allowed to take any vegetables and fruit into Chili territory. In normal circumsances this is not a problem, but as we had planned travel another 12 hours to arrive the same night in Santiago we had brought some advocados with us, to put on our bread…

Convinced that dry bread is just uneatable, and knowing that most Chilean custums are pretty sloppy crossing, we decided to hide the advocados behind our jackets that we left behind in the bus. So we entered the customs building with our backpacks, but without the advocados. In this building we found out that they were (as we had expected) scanning all backpacks for illigal stuff, so no stress there. Then suddenly these customs guys entered the bus itself (never before we had seen them doing that) and were going to search the bus for left luggage and other stuff. They did find some left luggage, but did not look into our left behind jackets, so we safely entered Chili with a nice, but illigal, bread topping.

After this somewhat tense border crossing we had a very nice ride into Chili, even seeing the famous Pucon vulcano. This all changed again when we had to change buses….

The plan was to do an 8-hour long bus ride across the Andes, arriving late in the evening in Temuco, which is a pretty dodgy Chilean city. This was no problem, as the guy selling us our bus ticket had told us, there were plenty of bus companies at Temuco´s bus terminal where you could hop onto one of the many night buses to Santiago, our final destination. Verry happy that our Spanish was getting pretty good (this guy talked only in Spanish, but we understood him very well), we planned to arrive at Temuco´s bus terminal during the evening and then to directly hop on to a night bus to Santiago.

All looked very well, until we arrived at Temuco´s bus terminal at 10 o´clock in the evening. The terminal we arrived at, looked pretty small and then we realised that this was not the main terminal, but only one of the many little bus terminals scatered around this very big city (our Spanish was probably not that good after all). Getting a little panicked now, I hurried to the bus driver and asked him if we somehow could catch a bus to Santiago,…. AHORA (now)!!! Realising that we wanted to go on a bus to Santiago the same night, he and his assistant quickly got our backpacks out from the bagage compartment and ran, carrying our backpacks with them, and us behind them, to their company´s office. There got us on the last night bus that was leaving this little bus terminal only 10 minutes later…

Happy everything was all right again, we discovered yet another problem. They said we could only pay in cash for the bus ride, there was no cash machine nearby and we didn´t have many Chilean pesos with us. After some frantic talking, searching and counting we found out that we  had just enough Chilean cash with us, left over from our previous visits, to pay for two cheap seats…

Only ten minutes later we left the dark and  dodgy ciy of Temuco again on our (not so comfortable, but no complains there) 8-hour night bus ride to Santiago, to arrive there safely in the morning.

Tomorrow we will leave Chili again for yet anoher crossing of borders and the Andes mountains, to arrive in Argentina again. We hope this bus ride will go smoother than the last one!

Jannis.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 2:22 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.