The Vacation

Happy 2014! Now that the holidays have passed, I've finally found time to sit and start these gargantuan blog posts. I left Angol on Dec 8th and travelled around for 10 days with my friend Steph, another volunteer. As expected, I took loooots of pictures, and I have sorted through them to present only the best to you now...

Let's start at the beginning! I took an overnight bus to meet Steph in a city called Osorno, which is the departure point for all buses crossing over into Argentina (which is where we were headed). I had purchased our tickets online, the week before, and we were all ready to go. Once the bus pulled out of the terminal, the ticket man came around to make sure everybody had their tickets but also their IDs/passports necessary for getting across the border. WELL. I learned out the hard way that I did not have everything I needed to cross the border, and so we found ourselves forlornly on the side of the road with our bags, our faces red with embarrassment and frustration (well, mine at least). I was just kicking myself for missing what had apparently been a very crucial travel detail. US citizens must pay an entrance fee to get into Argentina (I did know that!), and travellers entering by bus must pay the fee in advance, before they even get on the bus (I did not know that). In my gringo naïveté I had assumed I could pay the fee at the border, and nothing/nobody had told me otherwise--apparently if you buy the bus tickets in person, they make you pay the fee then and there, but I had bought the tickets online (and the website did not alert me because it obviously had no way of knowing I was not Chilean).  We trudged back to the bus station, hoping to at least get our bus ticekts refunded, but my justification fell on deaf ears at the ticket window. We were lucky enough to get seats on the next (and only other) bus leaving for Argentina that day, so I sucked up my financial losses and we resigned ourselves to spend our 5-hour wait in a big supermarket. 

This was obviously a rough start to the vacation that Steph and I were so excited for, and by association we did not have such a high opinion of the city of Osorno. But towards the end of our grocery store camping day, we decided to venture outside and wander around (the weather was finally nice!), and it turns out that Osorno actually has a huge nice plaza and a really unique and gorgeous church right smack in the middle of everything. 

mosaic saints

beautiful natural light from high windows all around the sanctuary!

When our late afternoon bus fiiiinally took off, we got some very very beautiful views (only the first of many on this trip), and we were actually crossing through the Andes as the sun was starting to set, which made for spectacular scenery. We had to get out and go through immigration twice, once leaving Chile before getting up into the mountains, and again to enter Argentina once we had gotten to the other side of the higher peaks.  

our first flag sighting, at the immigration station

After a very long day, we finally arrived to our first destination, Bariloche, in the dark that night. We made friends with some other travellers on the bus and got pizza with them before we all crashed, very excited to actually see the city the following day...