We finished the week in San Martin with a little fly fishing and rainy weather. What a great town. It is quite compact, packed into the small valley with many shops, cafe's and restaurants. I had a great experience at the hospital where I needed consultation on my blood pressure medication. I saw an intern that is on the staff four times during the week for very short discussions. No charge. While the facility is quite old the staff seemed quite energetic and competent. Our time share was one of the best we have stayed in for the overall experience. While we have had nicer units, here the staff, the club house, the activities were all first class. So we leave having had a good week.
Anyway on Saturday morning we left for Chile around 8:30. It was very cloudy and rainy. There are four routes we could choose from. The closest pass was 47 kms away, but after you crossed the frontier you had to take a 90 minute ferry across a lake and only at 5:00 pm. The next closest was 125 kms but it was North (we were going South in Chile) and when you crossed you had 40 kms of bad gravel road. So the third pass, and last pass, was our default choice. We could take the Seven Lakes Road back up to that pass, the road we came over from Bariloche on, or we could drive an extra 200 kms around to get to the pass on a totally blacktopped group of roads. Since it had rained for two days and (read the last blog) we had enough trouble coming here, we took the long route.
Well it turned out pretty well. The 200 kms of Argentina is beautiful high range land just in front of the snow capped Andes range. The road followed a mountain river valley which was beautiful. And to top if off we saw a large black bear, the largest deer and antler rack I have ever seen, pink flamingos and two rainbows. On the last rainbow we could see both ends and all the colors of the spectrum for a brief period of time (sorry no pictures).
Then we headed up to the mountain pass (hwy 231) and the Argentine/Chile frontier. The last Argentine town was a very touristy place full of log cabins with shops and cafe in all of them. From there it was a winding two lane road, quite a good road. We passed through the Argentine border station with a small amount of paperwork for us and the rental car. Then there was about 20 kms of high mountain winding road before we passed a "welcome to Chile sign". Then another 20 kms before we got to the Chile border station. There we had the same paperwork for us and the auto, but here they wanted to look at all of our luggage. We had to take it out and using a table along side the road open each for inspection. The inspection wasn't too thorough but they were prepared to be thorough. Then it was another 20 kms(hwy 215) before there was any sign of life in Chile. The Chile side does look different because it is much greener with a lot more vegetation and a lot of large ferns in the woods. The rain falls on the western side of the mountains.
In general the land looked a lot more like farm land than ranch land. Many more fences and dairy cattle. The road took us along the South side of a large lake. Soon the small towns started and then eventually we were in Orsono, Chile and we met Route 5, the Pan American Highway, which we took South about 85 kms to Puerto Varas. It is a modest sized town alongside the second largest lake in Chile. A huge volcano sits on the other side of the lake and if the clouds ever clear we will go see it.
