As far as border crossings go, the route from Mendoza to Chile's capital Santiago is pretty spectacular. The pictures of the mountains say it all!
As usual, actually getting through customs was eventful. Chilean customs are super thorough, routed through everything including my pants, questioned my tubs of Dulce de Leche and told me off for not declaring my teabags! But what caused the real stir however was... the capybara skull!
The skull of this over sized rodent was loving carried by Pete all the way from the Venezuelan savannah. It's been through every other border in S.America but the Chileans told us the skull was protected under the CITES act to protect the animals. Three hours later hanging about in their office googling capybara statistics, fifteen forms signed (by me for some reason, I am now some kind of an animal smuggler according to Chilean law!) and a lot of huffing and puffing, we were told that in fact the skull did not need to be returned to Venezuela as customs initially claimed but that we could collect him in a weeks time from some obscure office near Valpairiso!
No fines, smiles all round but the whole saga was totally loco! There are millions of them, we are quite sure they are not endangered and this one was killed by a Cayman anyway. Quite an amusing story for us, but maybe not so much so for our fellow bus riders who arrived in Santiago 4 hours delayed... the joys of border crossings!
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