Crossing the Andes!

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We finally got out of Mendoza! (but before we did I discovered I'd lost my camera and all there were about 200 pics of our trip on it, only place I could recall losing it was on the city tour practically a week ago, so off we went to the office and turns out the guide who found it was on a trip up in the Andes and wouldn't be able to get it to me, so the company agreed to post it to me in Salta, went out to get money which took about an hour and when I got back there was the guide with my camera, was never so happy to see anybody, so I'm back to being snap happy!))
So we headed over the Andes to Santiago. The bus trip was spectacular if a little scary at times the bus was constantly overtaking trucks on real narrow roads close to the cliffs. We had to go throw border control again, which was a little intimidating as they lined us up, stared at us, had the sniffer dog, come at us and then scanned all our stuff. We went up and down snow capped mountains, past ski resorts and then down into really lush green valleys was amazing to see. Oh but en route Gwen chipped her tooth on an alfajore (biscuit).

As we approached Satiago you could see the smog, it's nearly always covered in smog cause its totally surrounded by mountains. We checked into Che Lagarte hostel, which was right downtown. The guy at reception wrote a note for Gwen to take to a dentist the following day. We went to bed early and Gwen headed to the dentist, she came back quite traumatised as she couldn't communicate with the dentist and they wanted to extract her tooth, but she held tough and has a temporary filling until she gets home. We went on a city tour of Santiago, where we saw the various plazas such as Plaza de Armas and some old buildings (although lots of them have been destroyed by earthquakes). We saw the Presidents offices and learnt a bit about one of the guys who liberated Chile Bernardo O'Higgins (no prizes for guessing where his father was from!).

Then we went to Cerro Santa Lucia, which was just beautiful it's like a hill right in the city but it's been designed into a park and is very tranquil and so Spanish looking. Pity the smog again covered the Andes in the background and some of the city. We got back on the bus and headed to a craft place and then the plan was to get back into town to pick up our laundry, but the trafiic was unbelievable so we sat on the bus for about an hour and a half not really going anywhere. Eventually we got off the bus, got the metro back into town, but got totally soaked on the way back. So again it was an early night for us.

We got up early this morning, and headed to Valparaiso which is where we are now, it's on the Pacific coast and from what we've seen so far, it's pretty stunning. The place is totally built around hills, so they have ascensores, which are like elevators that carry you up, so we've just done one and the view was just spectacular! We're going to see more of here tomorrow and then head on to San Pedro de Atacama, up North of Chile, tomorrow night.

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