Rising, we inhale the breakfast buffet, check email for the day, and enter another inter-continental coach to cargo us across the Andes. Adios Argentina! Hola Chile! Our eight hour journey jaunts along the recently rafted Rio Mendoza into scary sierras to breach the border below the base of mystical Mt. Aconcagua, then crawl down curving cordilleras to coast to sprawling Santiago...
In our sight, on the right, over grape draped Mendoza, is stupendous Mt. Tupungato, second only to Aconcagua in altitude. Just three hundred meters shorter, it teeters on the Andean eastern edge. It's igneous and incorporeal legends lingered in Incan incantations...but more modernly in the story of the Stardust: a post-WWII modified prop bomber that vanished into it's frozen slopes in 1947. The intriguing internationally mixed manifest of six included a diamond dealing Palestinian, a British diplomat delivering undisclosed documents for the King, and a German emigre' and her husband's ashes. In 2000, melting into a moraine, the plane's partial remains resurfaced, ending extra-terrestrial theories and conspiracy plots, but leaving lots of thoughts unanswered...
Unlike Aconcagua, mobbed by competing peaks, it's easier to appreciate Tupungato's summit.
Bumping it up, our bus plummets past a sunlit rapid we literally thundered through yesterday...
Ancient sea bottom stratum crumbles and tumbles in dynamic display under the unforgiving, unpredictable Andean climactic spectrum...
Colored crags collaborate like braggarts to reveal their surreal celestial landscapes...
Equally queer, tame unnameable creatures graze in the blazed beige features of these rocky reaches, unfazed and unamazed by man's passing fancy...
And the hills went higher...
And higher still...
Until...
At last, we passed Aconcagua, which is, at 6962 meters or 22,841 feet, over four miles and almost seven kilometers above the ocean, closer to space than any place in the Americas, the loftiest land in Mother Earth's southern skirt, the uppermost crust outside of Asia, and second only to Everest on the mountaineering milestone list of Seven Summits--the highest points on each continent! But now, it hides its high shy icy head in a crown of clouds...
At 3000 meters our bus peters to the border where we and our luggage--with requisite umbrage--are ordered to exit the bus...
While the Chilean immigration control fusses over tour busses...
The old Olympus beholds of cold picture of the chilly, silly two of us. To Us!
Bienvenido a Chile!
Back aboard after an hour of glowering with the boredom-doling border patrol, forward we roll. Despite "a little English" and "poco español", here's two new "amigas" from America and Argentina. Leandra! Mercedes! Smile ladies.
Click.
As we trundle ahead with rumbles and revs, our bus funnels through a half dozen tunnels to appear...well, here...atop a kilometer drop in the road. Our driver downshifts swiftly, deftly resisting each twist or drift, as passengers press into the view, peering left and then right and then left...
Armies of semis carefully garrison the perilous railless route, where, by comparison, the River of Milk (Rio de Leche) carelessly shoots a chute.
Beep Beep! Look our for the sheep!
On an incline of twenty-nine serpentine switchbacks, we were curving and swerving like undeserving mountaineers, dropping the gears and popping our ears. Can you track ten trucks tucked into the terraces?
Time passes like the mountain pass itself. Whitecapped black slopes become high desert scrub, rocky trickles ripple into creeks with fishing camps and cabins, signs and little catholic shrines appear on the shoulder, an old weathered man and his tethered old horse clop down to a town that's even older of course, and farms start to fill the space between hills...
We've still got some hours to go before Santiago, where, when we get there, we won't stay, but endeavor to be quick and clever about finding a way to Cajon'de Maipo, an outdoor retreat at the feet of the Chilean Andes, where our two night reservation in a rustic natural location awaits...
A recently widowed German man sat by me. I wish I had a picture of Gerald because we still trade email. He's traveling the world alone, making friends as he goes. He would take video of the mountains and narrate in German, collecting his adventure to send back to his daughter and new grandchild. He spoke several languages, but I tried to shake the dust off my Deutsch anyway, while Leandra and Mercedes laughed and nodded often, enjoying their best efforts to converse...
Guess what?!? Mercedes just emailed me a picture of Leandra and I, and Gerald is in the background!
About this time, the high definition flat screens on our deluxe double decker start showing "Flight 93"--the award winning documentary about the heroic efforts of innocent passengers on a terrible September day. It's hard to watch, and hard not to, and strange to know that the landscape we're passing is far more important to see. It is a DVD. And, although many of our Latin American companions napped, or kept their children occupied and giggling, every few seats there was a person staring intently at the television. I tried to keep my eyes and camera shutter on the rural scenes fluttering by, but the film kept drawing me in. Leandra watched too. It really made me think...about who we all are, about how far away Leandra and I were able to get, physically and mentally, but still how small the world is, and how dangerous or wonderful it can be, and how important human relationships are...
By the time it ended, Santiago began to appear and jarred us back to reality: we barely know Spanish, we know crime is a bit higher in Chile, we need to exchange money, we're about to get off in a bustling terminal looking like bewildered tourists, we don't really know how or if we'll find transportation to Cajon'de Maipo or how long it will take to get there, we're tired and hot and hungry and it's rush hour.
At this point, things aren't really looking up...
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