Bus journey to Argentina

Today I woke up early despite staying up late the night before. I find that am needing less sleep to function although I'm not sure why. We packed up and the nice German man who ran our hostel called us a cab. The cab tried to gouge us on the price to the bus station, saying that the cab is "rented" as soon as he gets the call to come pick us up which is why the price was $2000 pesos more than it should have been. We argued with him about how ludicrous that was and he finally agreed to let us pay the $4000 that the ride should have costed.

We got on our bus (which was practically empty) and settled in for the 8 hour bus ride. I was in and out of sleep for most of it and would be astonished when I woke up to see the Andes or a beautiful vineyard. It was definitely a picturesque drive.

When we got to the Chile/Argentina border, the bus entered a giant warehouse where it could be searched and all of the passengers had to get off and get into line to get their exit/entrance stamps. Our bus driver had us line up, but not in a line that went anywhere, just a line against the wall. We stood there for 45 minutes, growing more and more angry as other buses unloaded and got into lines that were actually going to result in a stamp in their passport. Our bus driver started dragging us around to different windows, trying to get a border employee to open a new kiosk and stamp our passports. Finally, they agreed and we started moving through. Of course, for everyone else it was smooth sailing but when Alyssa and I got to the front, we needed to pay a $160 reciprocity fee. They cannot take cash or just charge your credit card, you need to sign up on their website and pay online. They took us to a back room where they had an old computer connected to dial up internet. It took forever to make the payments and for a while their internet was down and the immigrations guy told me that if my payment didn't go through I couldn't leave the country on the bus...I'd just be stuck at this border crossing in the middle of nowhere...great. Everything finally worked out and we got back on the bus to head into Mendoza.

When we arrived at the bus terminal, some other backpackers recommended that we stay at "Alamo Hostel" which was ironically the one I had looked up. The other American who had been on our bus said that was where he was headed too, so he graciously offered to pay for the cab down their since we had not yet found an ATM to get Argentinian currency at yet. When we got to the hostel, they didn't have any private rooms available, so we settled for a four person dorm with two other girls. The girls were very nice so we felt like our stuff was safe with them, although there was no lock on the door so I was really more worried about theft from people who were not staying in our room.

We went out to dinner at a restaurant that we thought would have a good salad but we ended up ordering a pizza and a burger...lol. Luckily, they have really cheap wine in the restaurants so a cup of great wine is $2000 pesos or $4 USD. We headed to bed early, exhausted from our long day of travel but excited to be in Argentina.

 

 

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