What ya gonna do? Flew into Santiago from Easter Island and had a very long day and most of a night to kill before that long, long flight to Atlanta.
Having already displayed the uncanny local expertise garnered by my previous couple a hours in Santiago, hanging there another couple a hours would have been superfluous.
Not to mention boring.
But hark! What’s this?
Those bumps jutting up into the eastern horizon?
Let’s check it out.
The first thing I need to tell you about the Chilean Andes is that it hasn’t got the, um, cache, of either the Peruvian Andes or the Bolivian Andes.
This is because Chile is pretty much a spaghetti strand of a country that clings so close to the Pacific Ocean that the next tsunami is liable to wash it away altogether.
And don’t ask me why, but having beaten both Peru and Bolivia in a previous war of little note and even less consequence, Chile somehow neglected to confiscate the bulk of the Andes for its own tourism industry.
Where the hell was the Chamber of Commerce?
But that’s not the important thing.
The important thing is that Chile did carve itself out a very nice region of foothill vineyards.
And how cool is that? We’re talking prime wines.
I mean prime wines. With corks and everything.
Which as far as I could tell – not speaking the local lingo – came in two distinct varieties.
Red and white.
But inquiring minds cannot live on wine alone. So we must push eastward, ever eastward. While we could stand upright.
Interesting observation: Wine and elevation do not go together nearly as well as, say, wine and pasta.
Here’s an interesting fun fact.
If you feed a lama it will likely bless you in Tibetan.
If you feed a llama, it will likely spit on you.
Feed lamas, not llamas.
This is Inca Lagoon. Lagoon is Incan for lake.
Inca Lagoon comes with a very interesting legend. But I cannot vouch for its veracity because Disney has yet to make either an animated or live action flick about a doomed princess and her heart broken soul-mate.
But there is a life lesson here.
If you really love a girl, keep her away from cliffs.
In which we journeyed to a fabled ski lodge.
Only to discover that we got there before the snow.
I should mention that for a little two laned mountain road, this one had a lot of big trucks coming in from Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil and so forth.
If I were Bond, James Bond, I would dearly love to drive this switchback.
Dum de da dum, dum, dum, dum, dum de da dum…..
This is a pot. As a trained observer, nothing gets by me.
What to say about my couple a hours in the Chilean Andes?
Make sure you know your lamas from your llamas.
And come, pour the wine.
FreeGNV 