Do not ask me why we choose Uspallata for a stop over...that rural village actually turned out to be another beautiful scenery We stayed in a "hotel" called Viena (they obviously have some problems with the spelling), the owner's granddad is from Vienna! To tell you the truth, the hotel is no better than a hostel and for breakfast we had to wake up the owners! First day there, we enjoyed a "tour" through the lovely landscape on the horses - see pictures! That was really relaxing and took about 2h. I actually insisted to ride on a pony (which they did not have) until Lisi talked me into hopping on one of the "normal" ones. I have to explain that this was my first time on a horse in general and therefore no need for me to tell you about my fear once I actually sat on it...luckily for me, these horses were quite old anyway and I had to kick it a few times so it does not fall asleep! For the next day we took the bus to a place called Puente del Inca where a famous bridge from the Incas was to be seen. It was very interesting but because of the altitude I did not feel very well, neither did Lisi. We were up on 2.700m above sealevel and wanted to hike around a bit. The hike turned out to be a 6km walk to the next village (a ski "resort") where we had some tea and waited for the bus back to Uspallata. A bit of a waste that day but nevertheless worth to see that inca bridge. We made up for it the next day as we hiked about 7km up to the montanas 7 colores, some hills in the middle of nowhere and those colors were amazing! A few hours and a sunburn later we were back in Uspallata, finally hungry enough to get some lunch, we had to experience by disappointment that on a sunday there is no restaurant open for late lunch or afternoon snack. On top of that, the owner (we think he likes to have too many alcoholic drinks) left the hotel locked and was nowhere to be seen as we wanted to go back to relax there. Finally, we did get dinner somewhere and after that had no troubles getting to our room. On Monday, we had to catch the bus to Santiago in Chile quite early in the morning. This time, the owner of the hotel did not wake up to make us breakfast and we even had to leave the money on the table because we had to run for the bus. We just did not have any success to wake him up, we even tried several times (they had a bell which we did rang)... The bus ride to Santiago was over mountains and quite scary as we passed the Argentinan-Chilean border: the road was really bad and a lot of corners downhill. Our bus was a double decker and I do not even want to get into explaining how it moved sideways every corner...I have to say, it seems like that this trip gets really more exciting the further we travel up north...About 5h later we arrived in Santiago de Chile!