Skiing is a lot different in Chile than the US. It’s only 15 miles (25km) to the slopes from the Santiago suburb of Lo Barnechea.

But it takes an hour and a half to get there, if you don’t hit traffic, or as they say here, taco. Yes, taco in Chile means traffic as often as it means the Mexican food.

But if it’s raining in Santiago, that means it’s snowing in the mountains. And there’s gonna be some taco. I went up on Saturday and it took FOUR HOURS to go 15 miles.

That’s because there’s a lot of these bad boys. Switchbacks, or as they’re known in Chile, caracoles. Which means snails. Another awesome word. There are 40 switchbacks in all.

Oh yeah, and the road is ~1.5 lanes in many places, which means it’s really hard for two way traffic. In ski season, they solve this by making the road one way up from 8am to 1pm, and one way down after 3pm.

To make things worse, in the winter weather, Chilean drivers panic in a way that would make Atlantans and other U.S. southerners proud. People continually stop in the middle of the one lane road to spent 15 minutes putting snow chains on their tires. Often when it’s not needed. We never put them on our 2WD car and we made it up just fine.

Makes for an exhausting day. But it’s still kind of worth it in the end.