scary border crossing with views to die for! Literally.

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The kind waiter who served us food and pepsi also took us through the laborious 2 hour custom process at the border. At one checkpoint we had to show our passports and hand over our visas whilst a sniffer dog sniffed around our legs. On the second checkpoint we had to all line up, put our bags on a table whilst a sniffer dog ran over them looking for drugs and food which may bring in pests or mosquitoes which could affect the country's agriculture and destabilize the Chilean ecosystem .Then we had to put all our hand luggage through a scanner, go through the scanner ourselves and then all the luggage in the hold of the coach had to be scanned one by one, then we were made to tip customs for them doing their job. I think we are so lucky to have open borders in Europe and not to have to tip anybody who lifts a bag, in Argentina its custom to hand over money if someone helps you with your bags even if you don’t need the help. And I never need their help, I am very independent.

The views at the border were amazing. Once we had passed through into Chile we had to drive down from the top of the mountain going around 40 curves – each one labelled 40 to 1 with a thousand foot drop down to the desert below on our right and on our left we could see the part of the Andes towering above us which we had successfully passed, dwarfing over us leaving me with a feeling of me being a playmobil figure travelling in my old playmobil school bus, and being at the mercy of the giant Andes, a giant which could pick us up at anytime and throw us all out of the bus and over the cliff, one by one.

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