Mazatlan Musings

We headed down to Mazatlan to meet up with some friends and pass 8 days in an economy that was much easier on our wallets than California.  Even with free lodging, the cost of food and coffee in California was shocking after 9 weeks in South America.

Oh, man, Mazatlan is amazing.  Paved roads, modern cars, painted curbs, electricity, *laundromats that are reasonably priced* and SUCH GREAT FOOD!

Out for a day on the bay on the S/V Dakota

 The dollar is freakishly strong against the Mexican Peso right now, so the cost of living in Mazatlan was roughly similar to many of the places we'd been in South America, but the standards are much more developed.  Overall, it was very easy to see why so many Americans and Canadians choose to retire in Mazatlan. 

Best seat on the boat.

One drawback (for me) was that English is much more widely spoken in Mazatlan than where we were in South America.  I still got to use my Spanish and it did come in handy now and then, but often people wanted to practice their English. 

Tuna Carnitas.  Just think about that...

I was so very sad to leave the last location on our Sabbatical where I could speak Spanish every day.  I *really* enjoy struggling through life in another language and the feeling of learning every day.  If I had the year to plan again, I might consider doing a full year immersed in a single language.

The best part of Mazatlan was definitely spending time with our friends and getting to hang out with them on the boat, getting a feel for their dock-based life and comparing notes on their nomadic boat year vs. our nomadic stay-wherever year. 

We didn't really have a strong relationship with their children before, but after 8 days, we definitely have a sense of who they are. 

Getting to know our friends' and families' children has actually been one of the surprising benefits of this Sabbatical.  We didn't even consider it as something we'd be doing when we made our original plan, but because we've imposed upon and stayed with friends and family along the way we've gotten to spend time getting to know all sorts of hilarious and adorable little people related to the big people we know and love.

The Pearl (Steinbeck)

I was very happy to find an accessible literary classic based in Mexico that was set more or less in an area where I was headed (La Paz on the Baja side of the Sea of Cortez, not far from where our sailing friends had departed for their crossing to Mazatlan).

I read in bed and by the pool as an additional effort in my not-so-successful struggle to increase my literary education while getting the most from our sabbatical year.

The prose is chest-thumping poetry of rhyme and song. The seed is an epic story that’s been retold by the native peoples of the region over time and eventually shared with Steinbeck. But, Steinbeck’s version is written as a musically evocative pattern of simple short direct English sentences occasionally punctuated with Spanish and the unique sounds of the native peoples’ speech from the Sea of Cortez.

This work inspired me - reading and hearing the words in my head was a pleasure on every page, even while it was *so* depressing. I had forgotten about the sense of foreboding I felt ¾ of the way through Of Mice and Men, but this book brought it right back to me in all of its unique horrific building tension.

The native peoples and poverty in this book was quite the contrast to staying in Mazatlan, primarily hanging out with the sailing/cruising community, and occasionally interacting with the full-on dedicated gringo beach tourist community.

That difference between the parable Steinbeck wrote in 1947 and reality of where/what I was experiencing today helped me mentally tie together so much of what I was trying to process about the blending of the formerly (and sometimes still) thriving native communities in South America and the European immigrants into the current South American reality we experienced on our 2+ month tour.

If you are looking for a good classic Mexican-based novella (or a good intro to Steinbeck’s writing style), I highly recommend this one. (2 of my favorite excerpts below, for your reading pleasure.)

For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have. 

The killing of a man was not so evil as the killing of a boat. For a boat does not have sons, and a boat cannot protect itself, and a wounded boat does not heal.

Prisoners of Geography: 10 Maps That Explain Everything About the World

I had so many goals for the sabbatical.  And I knew I would in no way come close to even accomplishing most of them.

But, frankly, this is how I roll when I'm at my best.  I dream big and too much.  Then, I try to make space for everything I'd like to have happen in my life, even though I know it is impossible.  Instead of lamenting all of the failures that are inevitable, I try to keep an open mind and recognize situations where it makes sense to focus and apply effort because life and luck have put me in a situation where hard work is highly likely to pay big results towards one of my goals.  Essentially, I am the opposite of focused until I decide that it's time to be committed.

This is a very long-winded way of saying that some of the many things I was hoping for myself out of this sabbatical were to become more educated with respect to geography, history, anthropology, literature, and language.  Literature, has been quite the struggle, thus far.  But, thanks to travel forcing it on me, I have happily increased my knowledge with respect to geography, history, anthropology, and language, primarily just as a result of going places and interacting with the people there.

I picked up this book at my local hometown bookseller on a walk while waiting for takeout to bring to the friends who were hosting us.  It was the first non-travel physical book I'd read in ages, which no doubt helped contribute to its enjoyment by me (I love the kindle, but I miss real books!).

More importantly, this book informed me on geography, historical military conflicts (and how geography affects them), and all sorts of stuff that I think classically educated people (or war history nerds like my husband) already know.

But I didn't know much of what this book explained.  Russia's population is only 144 Million(ish)?  There are all sorts of disputed land claims in the Arctic?  The current peace in Europe (during my lifetime) is actually the longest period of peace they've had in ages?  The population of Tibet is now 90% Han Chinese?  Argentina was a top 10 economy in the beginning of the 1900s? 

So, yeah, this book was a big hit for me (Maps and Data! What's not to like?).  First, it was well-written, with great maps, and easy to process (at the risk of admitting that perhaps it simplified things too much, but if your choice is over-simplification or nothing, you may want to opt to start with simplification).

I feel much closer to my goal of a geographical education during the sabbatical than I did before I read this book. If you are not a hyper-war-history-nerd who is likely to already know the basics of the regional geography and history of each of the chapters, I think you would find this book very well-written, enlightening, well-laid out, and interesting.  

What is Okay?

So, 5ish months in, one of the biggest things I've learned from this Sabbatical is that there are any number of ways to think about what is "okay." 

Santiago Street Peacock.

In my hometown, okay means the 24 hour grocery store is open all the time (I don't have to plan for food needs), the gas stations always have gas (I don't have to plan for travel needs), the ATMs always have money, but also everyone takes credit cards (I don't have to plan for currency needs), the electricity is always on, the water is always running and hot and potable, and everything *just* *works*.

Big Fish at GAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centro_Cultural_Gabriela_Mistral)

This backdrop of everything just working supports the Silicon Valley lifestyle I've had for the last decade plus, where I work way more than 40 hours per week most of the time because I don't have to schedule the downtime to manage the little life things like picking up prescriptions or bread or laundry.  I can just do those things whenever suits me, more or less.

Native Sculpture in Plaza De Armas

But traveling, even in the US and Canada, you leave a bit of that convenience behind.  On the road trip in US and Canada, we were checking in and out of hotels/motels and using laundromats while relying on shaky Internet and going through very long stretches of rural nothingness (including US federal and mid-western numbered state roads that were unpaved).  During our road trip, it was clear that basic things had started to take more time and so we started to build in more space and time to handle the unknown, even in our homeland, home language, home culture.

Enter South America.

Guess what?

Famous Bogota Gate of Graffiti from El Pez (http://www.el-pez.com/)

The South American idea of Okay is *very* far off of the urban US idea of Okay. 

Toilets?  Ideally they'll flush, but maybe dangerously close to overflowing, and *definitely* you can't flush your toilet paper (unless you're somewhere fancy, where they will have a sign bragging about how you shouldn't throw your toilet paper on the ground and should instead (gasp) embrace the fancy place you are and put it in the inodoro (you know, the thing that eliminates odors).

We didn't try any of the treats from the Woman of Ceviche in the Panama Fish Market.

Water?  Tap water was often not drinkable and gross even if not dangerous.  Occasionally it was straight up not potable (usually with a notice of work hours when you can't drink the water, but occasionally, in places like Lima, just embarrassing for a major city not to have this issue under control).  Unless it was known as bad or disgusting, we drank tap water and had drinks with ice on our travels and were very pleased not to get sick from the water on this trip -- we thank all of the cheap wine for keeping our systems extra sanitary.

Trash?  What?  Throw it out the car window.  Litter on the freeways.  Put it somewhere sort of near the extra-full bin.  Or, in the case of the rubbish strike in Valparaiso, just pile it up in the middle of the street for one full month of stink.  This was okay for them.  They were sort of upset, but not really.  They knew it would work out eventually, and they were right.  It did.

This an okay stove in Peru (Guinea Pigs fattening up by scraps in the floor not shown)

Safety?  See that ledge without a barricade?  Good.  Don't go over it.  See that rusty bit of metal?  Good, don't touch it.  The South American version of safety assumes a much stronger sense of self determinism and control than the US (perhaps Californian?) version does.  I found myself being much more thoughtful about my own safety there because I *had* to be.  I couldn't trust that dangerous situations would be identified for me, so I started to do my own surveys.

Time?  Definite commitments of time are not a thing in South America.  They acknowledge all of the variables that could go wrong and merely target general time goals.  Everyone hopes it works out, but if it doesn't no one is super upset, they just try mañana. This is their version of Okay. 

Duck taped boots?  Just fine on our final portion of the hike through the Andes.

 
The German/Swiss/US time-billing culture, on the other hand, assumes that it is our obligation to manage our own variables to ensure we can meet time goals to ensure that third parties can depend upon us.  This is our Okay.  But there is so much infrastructure in place to support us in doing so that it is *reasonably* possible. 

This approach is just not remotely possible in South America and nothing brought this reality home to me more than the AirBNB host who waited 3 hours for us in the apartment.  She knew the earliest we could have arrived, and she just was willing to wait as long as was required for us to get there (after crossing the Argentinian/Chilean border in the Andes).  This was Okay for her.  We were very grateful.  But I couldn't imagine a Californian AirBNB host waiting in the unit for 3 hours for the guests to arrive simply because their flight/train/whatnot was delayed.

The Rosario fountain show was all kinds of broken.  But it, too, was okay.

In short, the way your local culture treats "Okay" is a serious issue that determines quite a bit of your quality of life.  High standards of Okay are easy for the folks who live there, but more than likely, if you are a service provider or otherwise working in that environment, a high standard of Okay is high stress for you, because you are not allowed any external excuses.  Meanwhile, a lower standard of Okay has lots of slack, much less immediate stress, and while traveling, for us, is much easier to handle assuming we build in the time for the assumed non-starts. 

Overall, I think in retirement I'd prefer to be in a less high-standard Okay society.  But, in an emergency, I think I'd much rather be in a society with a very high standard of Okay.

Books Consumed in South America

Between the daily walking, sight-seeing, eating, hiking, what-not, *and* the attempt at investing an hour a day or so with independent Spanish study (where I would sometimes read short stories or the newspaper in Spanish), I didn't find much time to read on the South American portion of our Sabbatical.

In fact, 5+ months into this Sabbatical, I'm kind of shocked at how much *less* literature reading (and audiobook time) I've put in during this time off than I normally do in my non-sabbatical life.

A big portion of the reading I did in South America was Internet and travel guide research about logistics, lodging, food, vocabulary, geography, unexpected cultural norms that will govern your experiences, etc.  When you don't have a full plan and you don't know where you are going next, you have to figure it out before you get there (or after/during when it doesn't work out according to plan), and, this is quite a big investment of time.

However, I did read a few written books in the last few months:

Turn Right at Machu Picchu	Mark Adams	A parallel analysis of the modern day trek and the historical one that Hiram Bingham took before he introduced the west to Machu Picchu.  Informative and entertaining (and gloriously easy to read after The Brothers Karamazov).
Bolivia Tried to Kill Us	Tony Hastie	Very useful story of backpackers doing a much more hardcore trekking South America trip than ours.  I read it while in Peru and Ecuador.  Their misadventures in Bolivia were part of the reason we decided to skip Bolivia on this trip and save it for another time, when we can dedicate time to just managing that specifically difficult portion (which should also be very rewarding) of South America.
Consider Phlebas (Culture Novel: Book 1)	Ian M Banks	The Culture novels are Sci-Fi cannon and I’d never gotten around to reading them.  E claimed I would like them and he was right.  This first one was interesting, thought provoking, forward thinking and edgy (particularly for a male white scottish writer in the 80s).  Most importantly, it was easy pulpy English brain candy, which is exactly what I needed as a distraction and relaxation from day to day language study, existence, and cultural adventures in Spanish.
The Player of Games (Culture Novel book 2)	Ian M Banks	The oh-so-popular concept of a game-player as some sort of ultimate functionary (Ender's Game, Ready Player One, The Last Starfighter, etc.)  but in the context of the Culture where resources are unlimited and glanding chemicals for internal consumption and gender swapping multiple times over the course of a single life is the norm.
Use of Weapons (Culture Novel book 3)	Ian M Banks	Very dark.  Still easy to read and within the Culture world, but more difficultly full of human horridness.
Look to Windward (Culture Novel book 7)	Ian M Banks	Books 4-6 of the Culture novels are not available on Kindle, and I wasn’t interested in books that weighed anything while traveling.  Thankfully, the only thing that really seems to link the Culture novels together is the Universe.  There is really no character continuation, so skipping out on 3 books didn’t negatively affect my enjoyment.  This book is much more critical of the Culture than the others I’ve read, as it’s told from the perspective of a member of a race where the Culture’s “benign” interference went horribly wrong and resulted in civil war and death. There is quite a bit of ham-fisted discussion of the meaning of extreme sports and taking risks and whether engaging in risk when your mindstate is backed up and can be rebooted if you die is “cheating” or not.  Good enough that I started book 8.

Running Update

So, I tried to keep up some semblance of a running schedule between the hiking while on the Canada and US road trip.  But for the South America trip I had to let running be a rarity.  If we were in a hotel with treadmills, I tried to use them, but more often than not, we were in AirBNBs or rural hotels without gyms.  When I did manage to get out for a run outdoors, I often had to cut runs short due to getting lost, South American street dogs, or just pure laziness and a desire to take walk breaks.

In short, for the first time since late 2004, I don't have an accurate daily Excel log of my running/walking/workouts for the last 2 months or more.  I've just been doing what feels natural and good.  I definitely got in some great mileage and altitude in the hiking in Peru, and after that, most of the daily sight-seeing walking and random hill climbing felt like I was maintaining a decent commitment to fitness.

I also fit in a couple of treadmill speed workouts that hinted at some definite improvements despite the time off.

It even seemed, from the fit of our clothes, that both E and I were losing weight during the first half of the trip. 

The last 3 weeks, however, was the road trip full of car-sitting and limiting our strenuous sight-seeing to ensure my mom was comfortable.  Oh, and we ate all of the delicious food.

Net-net, I got back to the inlaws in the US after 9 weeks away and after tons of travel and food indulgence, the scale was exactly even with what it was when we left for South America.  My legs do seem to have a bit more muscle than they did before we left (which makes sense from all the climbing), but I also managed to tweak my right knee and hamstring a bit from the hiking and stairs on our travels, *plus* I arrived back in the US with a fairly nasty head cold.

Suffice it to say that for the last two days, I've been heading out for some basic mileage with absolutely no attention to pace in an effort to ease my way back into some sort of regular running habit for the end of the year.  It's been nice not to have any running goals/obligations, but today, after reading some friends' running blogs and stringing together 3 pleasant easy miles in the Atlanta hills without stopping, I started to get that itch... I just may want to try to find a race in our upcoming travels.

We'll see.

Chile

They call Valparaiso the San Francisco of South America.

Chile was the last country of our South American travel.  It's also the strongest and most industrialized economy in South America.  A guy we met in Mendoza joked, "Oh, you'll love it, it's like the 51st state."  This was a very tongue in cheek coded insult/truth as Argentina and Chile have quite a bit of a rivalry, and Chile was the site of British colonies, and is certainly much more consumer and customer-service oriented than any other country we visited this trip (with the exception of perhaps parts of Panama).

Chilean flag in Santiago's Plaza de Armas.

Also, my mom was coming to join us for the Chilean portion of the trip, and it was definitely easier to have her join us there than it would have been in many of the more adventurous and less developed locations we visited.

Texas State Flag -- not that different, but Chile's came first!

With mom came lots of shopping (something I hadn't done at all in South America), and more of a general English-speaking existence, plus restaurant tours to seek out some of our favorite dishes from the trip (we made sure she enjoyed an Argentinian steakhouse, a Peruvian restaurant, lunch of take-out empanadas, and Chilean specialties).  Doing all of these things felt like the trip was slowly coming to a close even before we left the continent.

Peruvian ceviche, Chilean portion (gigantic!)

Of course, even though it was less foreign, there were still some very authentic South American experiences in Chile.

Machas a la parmesana (clams baked with parmesan, surprisingly delicious.

For example, the strike in Valparaiso that meant we were greeted with gigantic piles of stinky trash that hadn't been collected in a month.  Thankfully, the strike ended while we were there and the trash was collected and the funiculars opened up so we could take one up to our AirBNB rather than hiking up the hill (or cheating by taking the elevator in the mall set into the hill).  The last stereotypical experience, was when we went to go find our AirBNB host to deposit our luggage with him as we'd discussed and arranged the day before.  It turned out, he'd left and was nowhere to be found without explanation, so we had to lock the keys into the apartment and figure out a new plan that involved taking our luggage with us for our last visit to the city before hopping on the bus back to Santiago and the plane.

La Vega Mercado Central, Santiago

We took two tours with Tours 4 Tips in Santiago, and the political background on Allende and Pinochet added some much needed perspective to the current US political situation (with some not-too-tongue-in-cheek rebukes regarding the US's involvement in Chile's political history).  For me, this solidified my understanding that a system that respects the internal peaceful transition of power, even if you personally, as a citizen, don't approve of the new power, is *not* something to take for granted.

View of Valparaiso from our AirBNB Balcony

It was absolutely wonderful to enjoy this time with both E and my mom, not the least because my mom's interaction with the street art was so fun to watch.  She's a painter, with a formal training in art, but this was the first time in her life when she'd truly experienced graffiti as art, and watching her understanding and appreciation of it grow was so fun. 
  

Gorgeous Valparaiso street work by Chilean artist INTI.

Mendoza to Santiago by Bus

Buying bus tickets to Santiago online was a very stereotypical South American experience.

A couple of weeks ago, when we realized flights from Cordoba to Santiago would be very expensive on the weekend (when we needed to fly to meet up with my mom), we changed our plans and did a road trip that ended in Mendoza, assuming we'd save money and enjoy some scenery with a bus from Mendoza to Santiago.

Part of the reason we decided to do this is that the Rome2Rio results indicated it would not be a very painful bus, by South American standards.

3 - 5 hours?  We can do this, no problem...

So, we headed out for the road trip, figuring that with 2 nights in Mendoza, we should be able to find bus tickets once we got there.

The afternoon of our arrival in Mendoza, after checking in to the Hyatt and receiving AMAZING treatment, we fired up our laptops and started our Internet research to solidify the next phase of our travels.

First, E asked Google Maps how long the bus ride was.  Google predicted 7 hours.  WHAT?  Then, I looked up *actual* tickets (instead of Rome2Rio falsified links), while E scoured the Internet for blog posts.  Turns out, the driving time is typically 5 hours, and time at the border is usually 2 hours.  Of course it is.  Oh well, we still had to get to Santiago and we had nothing but the Andes between us and it, so we were fairly committed to this plan, even if it was going to be much longer than anticipated. 

Border Crossing at Los Libertadores, high in the Andes

After confirming with the concierge which companies were reputable, we picked the bus tickets we wanted to do on busbud.com (we splurged the extra $6 each for cama) and I tried to buy them. 

For my first attempt, I filled in all of the information and selected seats, but, at the very last moment, despite having an AMEX logo and verifying my AMEX number as valid, busbud.com informed me that it couldn't accept AMEX and, of course, it deleted all of our trip information (including full name, passport, birthday, etc.). 

After the next attempt, I appeared to have successfully booked the tickets for the date and time we wanted, with the seats we wanted on the 2nd story of the bus so we could enjoy the views of the Andes without other cars blocking us.

View of the Andes over the grapes of Mendoza.

However, 2 hours later, when I went to confirm the booking I saw 2 emails, the first explaining that "something had gone wrong" and my booking hadn't gone through, and the second confirming our tickets for the time we'd selected, but one day too early. 

I tried to deal with their "support" via email, whatsapp, and phone.  After an hour or so of lots of effort but no results, I finally decided to try to book tickets again, and just dispute the original charge with my credit card.  This time, there were no available seats on the second story, which was a bummer, but we accepted it and booked anyways. 

The new tickets came through, and they were for the correct date and time, however, they had decided that we both had Canadian passports (I can assure you that Estados Unidos and Canada were not next to one another on the drop-down list).  The nice thing about having been in South America for so long, though, is that we knew the Canada/US mixup was not going to be a problem.  Or, if it was a problem, it would be solved, it would just take some time.

One the road -- headed up.

About an hour before our departure I got an email from Busbud.com saying they’d refunded the first tickets less a 20% charge.  I then got a second email saying the same thing.  I’d already printed the tickets, so I decided to ignore the concern in the back of my head that the second cancellation was for that day’s tickets and we headed to the station.

The departures screen showed several departures to Santiago, but none on our company (Nevada – highly recommended), nor at our departure time.  So, we walked to the Nevada counter, which was across from a big Nevada bus and a sign indicating that it was leaving for Santiago when we expected to go.

We bought some sandwiches, water, crackers, and candy (no one keeps single pesos in circulation in Argentina, and often the small bills and coins are hard to come by, so if you are due 8 pesos in change, many stores simply ask you which flavor of candies you’d like your pesos in).  Then we joined the bulge of chaos when they opened the bus for boarding.

It was dry season, but even so, melting snow made small rivers.

The conductor checked our tickets, asked our nationalities, and as expected didn’t flinch at the difference between the booked nationality of Canadian and actual nationality.  In fact, he decided with a shrug that he didn’t need to see our passports at all (he seemed to convey the idea that it was our problem if we got stuck at the border, not his).

Our luggage was loaded quickly, we tipped the steward, grabbed our luggage tags, and boarded the bus.

We tried to find our seats, but were confused and pleased to learn that they weren’t the lower level seats we’d been forced to book online, and instead, they were the upper level seats we’d tried to book on the 2^nd attempt.  Score.

Almost to the top.

We departed on time and enjoyed 2.5 hours of gorgeous views all the way to the border.

At the border, the bus stopped and we were given an opportunity to use the restrooms, buy some food, etc.  Half an hour later, we were back in the bus and still waiting to pull forward into the *real* line (not the parking lot where the buses waited until it was their turn to get in line).  Finally, an hour and a half after arrival, we were back in line and inching forward. 

At some point, our bus was cleared for immigration and we were told to leave our hand luggage on the bus and go clear through Chilean PDI.  We waited in our own line and a window was dedicated to (slowly) clearing everyone on our bus.  I noted that all of the Argentinians on our bus had taken *all* of their hand luggage off the bus, and I wondered if I’d made a big mistake by leaving my backpack and only taking my wallet & camera bag.  But, as E & I agreed, there was nothing we could do about our daypacks now…

Switchbacks down the steep Chilean side of the Andes.

After clearing immigration, we were told to reboard the bus, grab our hand luggage, and wait in line, between two long metal tables, this time holding our hand luggage.  The drug/food dog came through and happily sniffed everyone and everything a few times, but otherwise, this period was essentially an hour of nothing much happening except the bus conductor, his assistant, and the customs folks counting our group out loud every 2 minutes or so.  Oh, and random folks would occasionally get called back to go do some additional immigration processing, but it appeared to be only folks who were traveling on ID cards and not passports, so we weren’t too concerned.

At some point during this wait our checked luggage was brought through the customs area and sent through the x-ray machine, to be loaded back into the belly of the bus.

Finally, 2h15 after we arrived at the boarder, and after being counted at least 100 times, everyone agreed that our entire bus had cleared immigration and was inline in customs with their hand luggage.  Now, we were all told to send our hand luggage through the X-ray machine, one-by-one, and then to board the bus.  Because, you know: streamlining? Pipelining? Parallelism?  These are not things that South America does well.  I can’t even imagine how much delay could be saved by simply requiring that everyone take their hand luggage with them through immigration, then customs X-ray, and then reboard the bus on the assigned seat all in one motion.  But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned here it’s that they really don’t care about saving time.

So, we were on the road after 2.5 hours and we headed down the famed switchbacks to lose altitude down the Andes into Santiago.

More switchbacks.  Surprisingly smooth ride and great road condition.

Unfortunately, our scheduled arrival was for 5 PM on a Friday.  Due to the additional delay at the boarder, we hit the outskirts of town at 6, which means we sat in traffic for an hour to get to the station.  So, 9 hours after we left Mendoza, we were dropped off in front of (not within at a gate) the train station. 

We walked around trying to find a bank to get some Chilean pesos, but the first suggestion from Google was super wrong, so we headed into the nearest casino with our packs and asked where we could get some cash (casinos always know!).  Thankfully, Chile is a sane country about money and they do intelligent things like putting ATMs that work and have cash in the metro station, so we were able to get some cash, buy a metro card, and make our way to the AirBNB by 8 PM.

Our second day in Mendoza I got a response from busbud via whatsapp apologizing for the delay and asking if there was anything they could do.  (You know, 2 days after the first reservation that needed to be canceled. And 1 day after the second reservation I could have used some help making on credit due to the cancelation.)

And that’s our the story of how we crossed the Andes by bus.