Mar 9 & 10 - Easter Island to Mendoza

Mar 9^{th -}Leaving Easter Island

Given this strange and unusual place, I guess we shouldn’t have been too surprised to find out that our transfer to the airport was to be with the honorary British Consul to Easter Island who turns out to be a Scottish travel manager called James !!

We had to have our picture with him of course, but he couldn’t fit us all into his official car (complete with pennant) so we had to go in his truck…….

The VIP Team with the Honorary British Consul
for Easter Island who also owns
 a travel company

He dropped us off at the tiny airport, waved us goodbye and went on his way. Things then unravelled pretty quickly ! 

Our travel luck had run out and our plane had fuselage damage on the inward flight. They had to repair the fuselage but then had to wait for Boeing engineers in the States to check & certify the plane as fit to fly (given that we were about to fly over 3,500kn of nothing but ocean we were quite happy to wait !) We finally got the green light at 7pm a 6 hour delay after sitting in a baking outdoor airport in 90% humidity.

We finally arrived back in Santiago and got to our hotel at 3am with a 7.15am departure for our public bus across the Andes to Mendoza in Argentina !!

Mar 10^th  Across the Andes

Setting in for what we were advised
was to be a 3-4 hour bus ride

Four very tired & grungy travellers got to the bus station for our journey after 4 hours sleep. The bus turned out to be much better than we had expected, a double decker, very comfortable with reclining seats. All good so far. 

Now all we had to do was stay awake to see the scenery…..little chance of that with a nice warm comfortable bus when we had had 3 hours sleep. Mandy then suggested the Meerkat solution where one of us stood watch & woke the others up if the scenery was good which worked pretty well.

Glaciers on the top of the Andes

It was a pretty trip through the Andes with a stretch of pretty good consecutive hair-pin bends- 25 to be exact ………..and then some very high peaks and glaciers.

Bend 27 - going dizzy

The trip went well until we reached the Chilean/Argentinian land border in the middle of the Andes which was then everything went pear shaped.

The Bribe

We had been warned the customs check could take a couple of hours and they did random checks on some buses and cars. Due to the currency issues in Argentina, many people go across to Santiago in Chile by bus to do shopping.
Also, it is customary to pay a charge also known as a bribe to get bags reloaded on the bus

We pulled into the border area and sat in a long queue of cars and buses for a couple of hours before it was our turn to go through. We all had to get off the bus for border passport checks which took an hour but went pretty smoothly and we got back on the the bus expecting to get on our way.

Two Argentinian traders having around
100 purses and hand bags confiscated

They pulled our bus out into a special customs lane and we were all told to get off the bus with all our hand luggage for a full customs check. They unloaded all the luggage and the customs team then came down the line. 

They took one look at us and said we could get back on the bus leaving all the local people to be searched. The customs guy then came on the bus to apologise & explain that there are lots of people smuggling goods to sell back into Argentina.

They had obviously had a tip off and searched the bags of two women who proceeded to unpack about a hundred handbags & purses from their luggage !!!  We were sharing a bus with handbag smugglers…

The Argentinian Police checking papers

Another two hours later, they repacked all the other luggage back onto the bus and we finally got under way. Great we thought…….Mendoza here we come !  10 minutes later we came to a Carabinieri station and guess what……..they got on & checked all our papers again…….!!!

By this time we were losing the will to live regardless of how stunning the scenery was for the last 2-3 hours of the drive. We finally arrived in Mendoza 10 hours after leaving Santiago for what should have been a 4-6 hour journey including customs.

Fortunately our hotel in Luyan de Cuyo a small wine area in the Mendoza region was lovely and we finally got settled in with a glass of Malbec & some dinner. 

That was probably the longest day we had had, at least it was punctuated with some drama.

The last part of the route into Mendoza
was beautiful and the Geology colourful

The Vinyards of Mendoza - Home of Malbec
high on Janettes' priority list

 es

There are not many boarders take 3 hours plus to get over

There obviously was a train line across at one point
but seismic activity had had its way