In the end I decided to head out before it possibly would be too late. So instead of taking the bus on Tuesday I left on Friday and booked a couple of nights in an airbnb in Santiago.
Boy am I glad I did!
Although there was not much of bad weather to be seen when we left at 6am, by the time we got to the border at 4000ft it was snowing heavily and one of the big, state of the art snowploughs of the Chileans had just come back from its third trip down the pass “on the other side”.
Mounting and removing chains on the bus added about 30min to our travel time, but in the end we arrived!
Uffff….