Mendoza to Santiago

It was a nice quiet night in the park next to the police station. We woke up and dumped and went to find a gas station and a bakery. It took an hour to drive around looking for a YPF and realized after the second bakery only had small croissants and biscuits that we gave up on the baked goods.

We headed up the mountain pass. There were tens of semi trucks parked around Mendoza, I assumed staged for the pass. Semi trucks take hours to pass borders and with closures due to weather I am sure they were backed up for days.

The weather was beautiful and the Andes range were snow covered. It was slow going up the mountain behind semi trucks. We stopped at the first sign of snow at one of the entrances for the Parque Provincial Aconcagua. Aconcagua is the tallest mountain Western hemisphere, and the tallest mountain outside of the Himalayas at 22,838 ft. 

The kids played in the snow and Christine made lunch. Dd wasn't feeling great and didn't have breakfast and we were climbing in elevation and he developed a headache at Cotopaxi in Ecuador.

We pushed on and reached the high point of the pass at the Christ the Redeemer tunnel at 10,500 ft. Shortly after was a long queue of vehicles for the border to enter Chile.

The border is somewhere in the tunnel but the immigration and customs is a few kilometers away. 

It was about a 3 hour wait to get through the border because of all the vehicles. Chile is notorious for taking fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, and honey. We hid some snacks and cut up some fruit and cooked some meats and vegetables. We did throw away a few things. 

The inspection didn't take long and they didn't make us take out all our belongings like the other vehicles. 

We headed down the pass but it was still slow going with the semi trucks. There are 29 switchbacks to descend from the border and we passed ski resorts and chair lifts on both sides of the border.

Families sledded down the small hills.

We decided to push all the way to Santiago to check into a hotel by the airport. It is tough to find secure parking for our RV but Christine had the great idea of looking at airport hotels. We stopped at a grocery store and then we checked into La Quinta at the airport and it was safe and clean and warm.