Remember that volcano that erupted in Chile earlier this year and covered everything with several feet of ash? Well, me neither. But it happened and although the original eruption was in July, Volcán Puyehue is still spewing ash.

We got the first clue when we stopped to pee a couple of kilometers from the Argentine border. I noted that the leafy bush I was squatting behind looked like it had been sprayed with some kind of nasty pesticide. I noticed the same of the trees lining the road, they were all a muted grey-green, markedly different from the usual luscious greens of the Lake Region. I thought this was weird but I soon forgot about it. When we came to a line of stopped cars the funny looking trees were the last thing on my mind. Car accident? Trouble at the border? A man from one of the other cars came by to tell us that the border was closed for, well, we didn’t catch quite what. Macky thought he said “cenista,” possibly a derivative of cena, dinner. But no right-minded Chilean has cena at 6 pm. That’s more like early lunch.

Then things fell into place. Not cenista. Ceniza. Ash. Suddenly the layer of dust on all the leaves made sense. Not dust, not pesticide–volcanic ash. We waited at the border for about 45 minutes before being turned around. The volcanic ash made the mountain pass over the Andes unpassable. We found a campsite several kilometers away that accepted American dollars–a necessity at this point because we were stone broke except for a stray twenty I had stowed away. We had been planning to find an ATM across the border. Everything at the campground was covered in a fine layer of ash. The river rushed a foamy gray and its banks were covered in light, white pumice stones. When we turned on our headlamps at night we could see the ash floating in the air we were breathing.

The border was open the next morning. After a minor snaffu with Macky’s temporary passport and the fact that, oops, our rental car technically wasn’t allowed into Argentina until the next day, we got through Aduana Chilena. Turns out they are a lot more flexible about incorrect paperwork than oranges. There is a twenty kilometer drive between the Chilean border post and Aduana Argentina. This drive goes up into the mountains, into Parque Nacional Huapi. It was like driving onto another planet. Tall scraggy leafless trees, bare, rocky ash-covered mountain faces, ash piled like dirty snow banks on the side of the road. It was winter in the middle of summer. It was truly bizarre. When we opened the windows we could smell the heat, the bitter acrid taste of ash. When we started choking and our eyes started watering we shut the windows. As we descended into Argentina the ash-cloud thickened. We drove through towns that last summer were probably thriving tourist outposts. Now the color has been sucked out of them. They are ghost-towns, painted in gray scale, the air dry and brittle. It took us several hours of driving to escape the ash.

THAT'S NOT SNOW.