Off to Santiago

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as I told the Prussian princeses, it was time for me to go. It took a full twenty minutes for me to dry my eyes, compose myself and get ready for yet another bus. They strangely enough were ok about it. As the bus took of I had a sense of deja vu, well as sods law would have it, the route this bus took to Santiago was the same one as the bus took to the base camp of that big mountain I was at on Tuesday, wot I cant spell the name of. You couldn`t invent it.

A fter several hours of doing the same thing I did a few days ago I was mildly entertained by customs, which was an example of Fordism gone wild. You had two adjacent booths next to each other, one for Chile and one for Argentina. You waited in a long queue at the Argentine booth, the person with the uniform took the bit of paper you recieved on entering the country, stamped your passport and gave you another load of paper, which you took to the next long queue at the next booth, where a person in a different uniform took the load of paper `from you stamped your passport and gave you one of the bits of paper back. Why didn`t they just give each other the load of paper? I wouldn't have objected.

Well as much as the climb to the customs post was straightforward, the descent on the Chilean side was terrifying: it wasn`t a descent but a drop, a fucking big one, the road wound beneath you for at least a couple of thousand feet towards what looked like a little resevoir, but was probably a big massive one. There must have been at least thirty tightly bound switches on the road, every one with a unreal gradient, What was worse was there was little leeway outside of the macadamed surface, no crash barriers and we would be going through some clouds. I dont know what was worse, watching the front of the bus overlapping with the end of the road, or wondering in the murk if we were about to lose òur footing.

Heights usually dont bother me, but I`ll tell you I`ll not be doing that again. Any way I am now in Santiago, I have changed my underwear and am chugging down sedatives.