We left the beautiful city of Mendoza with its parks, tree-lined streets, wine, and wide smooth sidewalks to climb 1850m back into the Andes to the tourist town of Uspallata. To get there, we passed through maybe 12 tunnels as we followed the Mendoza River upstream through more spectacular red mountains and canyons, and then we rounded a bend in the highway, and there, laid out in front of us, were the beautiful snow-capped mountains of the Andes that separate Argentina and Chile.

We could not leave Argentina without visiting a restaurant with a parrilla for a bit of meat as today we climbed to the top of the pass very close to the frontier where we will spend the night around 4000m, then cross into Chile tomorrow.