A friend and I decided to go to Uspallata for the weekend, because it's a three day weekend in Chile. So we headed off bright and early at about 11:00 Saturday morning for the Caracoles and tunnel into Argentina. For some reason, everyone else in Santiago had the same idea, so we were forced to wait at the Chilean border for about an hour and a half to get checked out of the country. This isn't the actual customs procedure, this is just someone in a booth writing your license plate down on a piece of paper. Then we went to Argentina, where the line was about a half mile long and three cars wide. The Argentine officer managing the line told me that because I was on a motorcyce, I didn't have to wait in line. When I got inside the customs barn, where Argentina and Chile work side by side in what is known as an integrated frontier, the Argentine officer there told me I had to go back to the end of the line. I told him the officer outside told me to come in, so he sent me to the shortest line.
That day was wonderful, with nice hot weather, and lots of Argentine beef and beer. The next day too was great. We stayed at a cabin on the side of the road, and lounged around the pool all day long. That night, it rained briefly, as it often does on the Argentine side of the Andes. Argentina is flat, so clouds travel fast across the country and pile up against the mountains.
The next day was sunny, so we decided to take a short trip to Villavicencio, a town in the mountains with a hotspring about 30 or 40 miles away. The road changed to gravel about half way there, and when we were about 18 miles away, it started to rain. Now I knew about the gravel road, and that the other side of Villavicencio is paved to Mendoza, so I decided to press on, even though the rain was increasing and off in the distance there was lightning and thunder.
My friend had packed a cloth coat and sweater to keep warm, and was wearing tennis shoes. Soon she was wearing my sweater as the road began switching back and forth when we climbed and turned into the lightning. I began to have some trepidation, and looked around for somewhere to take cover. The ground is mostly shale and berift of cover. The road was shale, and slabs of rock. The hail that began to fall made the large slabs of road fairly challenging. The large rocks that had fallen and blocked half the road in places reminded me that it was best to keep moving. We made it to the summit, and began the dangerous switchbacks down the other side.
At one wide spot in the road, I stopped to take pictures and asked the couple that had the same idea where Villavicencio is. The husband pointed to a building at the bottom of the mountain. The town is a lot smaller than I thought it would be. He told me the road back to Mendoza is fine except for the 8 miles where it is gravel.
We went through Villavicencio fairly fast, and I noticed that under pretty much every tree all the way back to Mendoza an Argentine family was having a barbeque. Some of them had strapped mattresses on the car and driven out, others were barbequing an entire goat. Many were sleeping, and under some of the trees peope had over the years built brick parillas, the Argentine barbeque.
We had lunch in Mendoza, then climbed back into the Andes and headed for Uspallata. The weather was hot and I was enjoying being on the bike again, once I dried out. We got gas in Uspallata, and I filled my spare tank, because gas is about 40 percent cheaper in Argentina than Chile, and headed for the tunnel back to Chile. About thirty miles away, it started to rain, a cold, miserable rain. About 20 miles away from the tunnel, we passed an overturned tour bus. About fifteen miles away, the rain turned to snow, and I truly began to freeze. The snow clung to my visor, and I had to raise it to see, and then the snow clung to my glasses. I was happy to see the tunnel, but once through, the snow was waiting for me. By the time we got to the integrated frontier, and three hour line, I couldn't feel my hands. I told this to the Chilean border guards, and they let me park inside with the tour busses and thaw out.
We rode to Santiago to find out Pinochet the ruthless dictator/ savior of Chile had died that afternoon, and the fans of the old rascal were fighting in the streets with the fans of justice and human rights and the police. The police have water cannons, and were clearly winning. The apartment is three blocks from the Moneda, the Chilean White House, which is apparently the best place to gather a mob at a time like this, so the supermarket was closed, the streets were wet and sealed off, and the night was full of shouts and car horns. On every channel, the TV had nothing but Pinochet.
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