Border trouble - leaving Argentina

Whilst we’ve been on quite a few bus trips over the last 6 months, we’ve never managed to command the front row upstairs seats, and the panoramic, widescreen views that these much sought-after seats afford. You have to book well in advance and the nature of our journey has been much more day to day.  

Nevertheless, our precise leaving date from Santiago has been fixed from the start, so this gave us an opportunity to book ahead front row cama seats (wide, reclining and very comfy) on arguably one of the best routes of all - crossing the Andes at Los Libertadores, from Mendoza to Santiago.  This would give us a good view of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas, along the way, and arguably an even better view than the driver over the 27 tight switchbacks as we pass over the border into Chile. 

So it was with some excitement that we turned up on time at the bus terminal in Mendoza on the 8th Feb, only to be told that the bus had been cancelled, and in fact all buses had been cancelled - for three days - as a result of heavy rain, snowfalls and serious landslides on the Argentinian side of the border! Suddenly, our extra day of contingency that we’d allowed ourselves in Santiago ahead of the New Zealand flight, “just in case the bus got a little held up” seemed somewhat inadequate.

We left the melée of the bus terminal and headed over to a cafe with wifi and started looking at options.  Car hire? We’d literally returned our car from a 5 week rental just 30 minutes before. Flights? It’s an expensive route at the best of times, but with the border closed, would be exorbitant.  Extend our stay? There would be costs to changing flights, not to mention whether there would be availability.  

We were very fortunate that our friend Erick, who owns Mendoza Car Rental, came down to the cafe and spent a couple of hours with us going through a series of different options.  In the end he very kindly got the ball rolling on some flights from Mendoza to Santiago through his agent at less cost than we could have done ourselves, and we decided to bite the bullet and fly the following morning, enabling us to catch the New Zealand flights already booked. Changing those would have meant at least a weeks delay, and we’d end up spending as much as the flights to santiago anyway, on food, accommodation and car hire.

The sort of view we were hoping to get a lot more of on the bus......

Trying to get our money back on the bus tickets was an interesting challenge.  The first place I tried, there was a queue of angry looking customers snaking out of the Andesmar office, staffed by just one employee - a very harrassed looking lady, who also happened to be trying to manage two phone calls at the same time.  When I finally got to the front of the queue, the answer was the same - “No hay plata” which felt like it ought to mean “Computer says 'No' ”, but in fact means "There is no money".  There had been so many request for refunds that they had (apparently) run out!  It was the same story at 4 other Andesmar offices in Mendoza. 

So not only had we missed the visual treat of the Andes crossing that we’d hoped for, we’d been hit with the extra flight costs, we couldn’t get our bus money back, and, to add insult to injury, we’re still battling with Booking.com for a refund of the accommodation in Santiago we had booked because we would be couldn’t get there! Not one of our better days.