It was an intense and nerve-racking couple of days!
The closer I got to my departure day the more snow was supposed to come – and it’s timing shifted in unfavorable ways: more days of snow starting sooner.
That left me with a dilemma: wait it out and hope that the storm will have moved through with a couple of days left for the snowplough (there just might be only one in service this side of the Andes……) to do its job, or speculate that it reverts to its original schedule and perhaps leave a few days earlier than planned to get over the pass into Chile before it closes down.
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….
First I spent a wonderful Sunday morning trading stories with my friend Carlos in his bakery/café “The Brothaus”.
Then I visited an excellent show of some of Turner’s watercolors in “La Moneda”, my favorite museum in Santiago.
Finally I came down with the flu….