Crossing the border - The Andes Mountains

It is off to Santiago de Chile I go! Argentina is amazing, I love it, stole my heart! Who would have guessed!? (joke, it was almost a guarantee) 

Crossing the border from Argentina to Chile involves going over a crazy high mountain pass in the Andes Mountains.  This turns out to be a very long as well as hair-raising experience. I set out on the 9 am bus with an expected arrival of 4 pm (7 hours) which quickly turned into a 10 hour trip when we encountered an delay due to an accident on the 1 lane road over the pass. oh well!

The border crossing was pretty smooth by Latin American standards and then began the hair-raising. While efficiency in border crossing processes might not be Chilean strong suit building some serious mountain roads are! We spent at least an hour traversing some serious switchbacks on our way down the back side of  a mountain into Chile. There were a couple times I started to panic a teeny tiny bit as I am pretty sure we had a front wheel over the edge of the cliff! Sure enough though safe and sound into the city of Santiago!

More to come from my new home for the next two weeks: Santiago, Chile. After that I will be saying goodbye to Latin America, a brief hello to family in LA and then off to the other side of the world: Tokyo! 

Yikes!