A beautiful 4 hour bus journey past multicoloured mountains led us to Puente Del Inca. It was a bit of a shock to the system. It had been quite hot in Mendoza, blue skies quite sunny. We arrived to this tiny village in the mountains to find heavy snow. The village is named after its main attraction, a natural sulphur bridge over a river. Theres the remains of an old hotel and spring which you cant access any more.

We'd called the day before and made a reservation at a hostel called la vieja estacion so when we arrived we inquired with the locals where it was. Turned out it had been closed since summer! that had´nt stopped them taking our booking though. We were redirected to the only hostel open where we met a couple of french guys who had also arrived on our bus. We all headed out to the only cafe (if you could call it that) where we were offered either a pizza or a lomito completo (steak sandwhich with salad, cheese, ham and egg). The villages main attraction took all of 2 minutes to see so we set about building ourselves a snow man instead.

We spent the evening playing cards and drinking beer with the french guys and the one other tourist in the village while discussing our growing doubt as to whether we would be able to leave the next morning (the snow was pretty thick already and didn´t seem to be stopping). At one point there was a powercut for about half an hour which didn´t exactly make us any more optimistic about the weather situation.

By the morning the snow was knee deep and it wasn´t looking hopeful. The french guys helped the other bloke, who was from Mendoza, to dig a path so he could wheel his motorbike back to the road and attempt to escape. We were sitting by the heater in the hostel when the hostel owner came running in saying 'autobus, autobus'. we quickly packed everything up and headed as fast as we could through the snow to the road. The bus had to drive backwards at a ridiculously slow speed for quite a while before it got anywhere where it could safely turn. Once we got out of the snowy zone it was a pretty quick journey to Uspallata, the last point at which you can catch a bus to Santiago de Chile. But unsuprisingly there were no buses to be caught.