Salta and Beyond (mostly beyond)

Here we go.

We spent two days just looking around Salta. It is a cool town, lots of amazing churches and a great town plaza. Laid back and cheaper than most places we have been already with amazing fruit, I have been eating about 5 peaches a day and the biggest avacados I have ever seen, like three avacados in one, basically my dream! On Feb 29th, the three of us when out, finally stayed up until 2am to start the night. We went out with this guy who works at the hostel we were staying at. We went to this disco on a strip of road that is closed down at night as a party stretch. We got trashed and had a really great time just dancing around and being idiots. We were very different from all the Argentinian girls at the bar but the ratio of guys to girls was very good and we got hit on a lot. Hilarious. Anyway we made it back to the hostel at about 6:30 - 7am slept for about 2 hours and then had to get up check out of the hostel and pick up the car we had rented for the next four days. They guy actually dropped the car off for us and Anna bravely took it for a test ride with him despite her lack of sleep. I can say this now (mom) because we have arrived back safe and sound but driving in the cities here is a fucking mess!!!!!!!!! Almost all the intersections are uncontrolled ie as far as we can tell it is a constant game of chicken. Who ever has the balls goes through and the other person stops. there are no traffic lights or stop signs at most intersections and no real rules stand. After some hair raising experiences we made it out of Salta and we were off. The first place we headed was called San Antonio de los Cobres. We started out in very lush surroundings, humid and green. It is beautiful countryside around here. And then we began to climb in to a mountain range following a river and the scenery began to change. It was spectacular! We climbed basically into an Andean desert. It was amazing, huge cacti and remote adobe houses and churches. There were huge cliffs and mountains everywhere and the soil here was an amazing range of colours, there was bright red, brown, yellow, green and blue I am not kidding it was amazing (have I said that enough?). We finally drove up to 4010 metres above sea level. It was crazy. Then we finally reached our destination. It turned out to be so different then we expected. It was this tiny mining town in the absolute middle of nowhere and it was hands down the poorest saddest place I have ever been in my life. If we stopped the car we were surrounded by people trying to sell us stuff, even kids with rocks they seemed to have picked up off the ground. There was absolutely no where to buy food, except a little corner store where we bought some local goat cheese which turned out to be very good. It was such a sad sight this place not a tree for miles only dust and mud houses. Everyone was dressed as you would imagine people in the Bolivian highlands to dress, wide brimmed hats etc. I know I am going to see more of this in Bolivia etc. but it makes you feel really incredibly guilty. That you have so much and these people, kids have nothing. We were exhausted by the time we arrived, having no sleep the night before but we didn´t really want to stay in town, and the only place to stay was pretty expensive (they had the market cornered.) We couldn´t even find food, I went up to the door of a restaurant and knocked and asked if they had food, but the look the man gave me you would have though I went up to a random house and asked the same question, who knows maybe I did. So armed with our goat cheese, bread and some chocolate we headed back to salta. We finally reached a small down about 45min from salta at about 8 - 9 pm. We found a hostel, and headed down town to find some food. And we found a street meat stand (by far the best food we have found in Argentina) and we had the best meat sandwiches we have had yet in Argentina for about 4 pesos a piece (1.25 Canadian) I actually can´t discribe how good they are! they put this amazing spice on them and serve them with fresh tomatoes and onions so good. so we sat under a tiny aluminum shelter and ate our street meat while watching the rain fall, less than 200 kms ( which took hours to drive due to road conditions) from the poorest, driest place I have ever been, it felt weird.

The next day we woke well rested for once, ate our shitty breakfast that was served at the hostel - they do not have good coffee here it mostly tastes like it has paint thinner in it, and we were off. We headed back up through Salta and north. We drove again up from lush tropical palm trees and green green fields into a mountainous desert. We stopped around noon at this tiny town at the base of a hill called the seven color hill or something because it really was seven very distant colors, very beautiful. The town was cool, all adobe again, many houses were built using these mud and straw bricks. It was a touristy town where you could buy lots of amazing handy crafts. We spent a while just wandering around and checking it out. Then we were off traveling further up the road and higher in elevation. There are llamas and donkeys everywhere here. They are just roaming free crossing the road at will, sometimes you have to honk to get by. There are tiny remote houses sprinkled over vast desert spaces. Some flat and some jagged hills and some plateaus and some rolling hills. And randomly a person biking once and a while where they are going or where they came from we could never figure out. A little further down the road we began to get concerned with our lack of fuel. We had not filled up at the last place which was before the seven color hill and the next place (we weren´t even sure where that was) was seeming mighty far away but we kept on, it seemed the only thing to do. Now these are remote roads, we would pass another car maybe once or twice an hour. We finally reached these salt flats, after climbing the largest number of switch backs I have ever seen or experienced. We spent a while fooling around taking pictures, you can really fuck with perspective. and just admiring the vast vast whiteness of if. you can just drive out on the to the flattest remotest whitest place I have ever seen, and we were the only ones there, a truck would pass every once in a while. Then on again past more llamas and donkeys. Now the gas gage fell on empty but the light had yet to appear, we had our fingers crossed. Then finally we reached the town, Susques ( another dusty, three tree, six street town) and rolled into the gas station on fumes. We reached the hostel outside of town and really in the middle of nowhere, and I mean that. The landscape was rad, it was like how I would imagine the bad lands of the American south west to be, all rugged and full of desert plateaus and valleys and crazy rock formations. We finally settled in for another restful night but it was not to be. We were at 3650 meters above sea level and the altitude played havoc with us. I felt like I had a really tight anxious chest and I got a head ache. None of us could sleep so come dawn we all decided to go for a run, which is funny because of the altitude. We all independently ( because we started at different times) took this dirt road into the vastness. It was amazing to watch the sun rise over this kind of a landscape. I could sort of run on flat parts or down hill but had to walk up hill, my legs and lungs couldn´t handle it. Finally I went off the road and climbed this hill and just watching the sun turn the distant hills red, knowing that I was in the middle of vast emptiness.

After getting back from our runs we drove all the way back along the same road we came up on and then once we reached the highway we headed north again. We finally reached a town called Humhuaca. It was pretty cool, again I really felt like I was in a different part of the world. the town was made of all adobe houses and colonial architecture with tiny cobbled streets filled with people dressed in very traditional rural cloths mixed with travellers and people dressed pretty normally. There were little markets and corn fields. Stray dogs and donkeys abound. We took a nap when we got there, exhausted as we were then just looked around town. It was great. We had a traditional stew for lunch with these corn nuggets it was good then a big pizza for dinner. Pizza is the most global food it is everywhere.

The next day we drove out to this remote indigenous village, which turned out to be about three houses then drove two old indigenous women back into town. They were hilarious because none of us could understand the other so conversation was very difficult but we did learn that one woman was named Marie Antoinette. They took up much of the back and I was squashed to the side and managed on the very bumpy road to hit my head quite hard giving me a bad head ache. Anna and Lorena decided to go back to ferry more people back to town and I decided to wonder town some more not looking forward to more head wounds. I bought some more amazing local cheese, anyone who knows me knows I love cheese and you can´t get a better deal than a big round for 4 dollars. Finally we regrouped after Anna and Lorena made some wrong turns and we headed out of town and to a national park. After getting mixed up passing through the capital of the Jujuly province we reached our destination. We checked into a hotel which was dirt cheap and headed out the the park rangers office where I managed to stall the car 4 times trying to reverse so that the ranger came to see what was wrong. Today was just not my day, I was in a bad mood. Damn standard cars, and looking like an idiot. We reached the park and went for a short hike into misty jungle. WE reached an algae covered laguna and thought a frog might have been a puma making noise. I was happy it was a frog, but it sounded like a baby crying. Then we headed down to a river and went for a swim, which resulted in us covering ourselves in mud and taking some hilarious photos then back up to the car and into town. We went looking for our favorite food street meat but instead ended up eating at an asado, a barbecue which was pretty damn good. It started pouring down rain and we headed back through the nearly flooded streets to the hotel to spend a very sweaty night trying to sleep through the heat.

This morning we woke up early to get back to town to return the car at 11am. We were having a fine trip back when this bloody SUV tries to merge from the left of us on to this turn off. If Anna hadn´t thought super fast and swerved the car to the side we would have driven right into them, as it was our side mirror was bent back because we came that close. It was crazy and totally this other guys fault but we didn´t know enough Spanish to yell at him the way we should have but we and the car were all ok so it turned out as well as it could have but damn drivers in this country, again anyone who knows how much I hate being in cars can understand my discomfort at these situations and the driving attitude here in general! Well back in Salta now, planing where to next. Lorena is leaving us on Friday and heading back to Buenos Aries and then back to Canada while Anna and I are off to Bolivia we just have to decide how we want to get there. Hope you are all well, send news.