We've been busy travelling once again, so there's plenty to tell you. Most importantly......pictures are up!
Tucuman turned out to be a lot less interesting that we'd hoped it might be, so despite the foul cold that Anthony was suffering from we decided to leave after one night. We managed to get a open ticket along the more interesting of the two routes to Salta, which headed west through the mountains and some truely spectacular views.
The first town we stopped at was Tafi del Valle. Its a small place near the end of a long valley with a lake at the end. Its about 1200m above sea level and has pretty much no humidity, meaning that the skies are amazingly blue and you can see for miles. We decided to go for a walk up the hills facing the lake. Great views, unbelieveably hard work! The change in altitude combined with my cold made the walk seriously hard, but at least it provided good training for the Inca Trail.
From Tafi we caught a bus over the pass at the end of the valley to Aimacha del Valle. The landscape changed dramatically from a high, cool climate, to a dry desert climate. One great side effect of this is the huge numbers of cacti all over the place. We stayed in a rather hippie place in Aimacha, everyone was extremely friendly and made great food! Argentinians don't eat dinner until extremely late (10-12pm) so we had to wait a while, but was definitely worth it.
We caught a bus from Aimacha to the ruins at Quilmes, or rather the start of the 5km road to it. Then we walked through the desert to the ruins themselves. The people who built it managed to resist the Spanish for around 150 years, after having resisted takeover by the Incas before them. The ruins are built into the side of a mountain in a vast valley between two ranges, the view from them is amazing and our photos really don't do it justice. We then trekked back to the main road to get our stuff and catch the bus to Cafayate.
Cafayate is a small, pretty town about 180kms south of Salta. The first day we were there we did a trek to a nearby(ish) waterfall. We had to trek up a canyon and repeatedly cross the river before we even got to the first fall, further up the canyon was so steep sided that there was still frost where the sun doesn't get to the bottom at this time of year. Despite it being bloody cold at the top the main fall was huge and definitely worth the hard work to get there. After this, we spent the next day taking it rather easy... including trying wine icecream.....very, very strong tasting but interesting!
We're now in Salta, trying to work out whether to go to San Pedro de Atacama in the northeast of Chile, or to carry on into Bolivia and visit the salt flats at Uuyni. We'll go there anyway...its just a matter of when! We're rather glad we have plenty of time as Carla and Jeremy have had to head straight on north...they've got about 5 days to reach Cuzco which is a hell of a long way from here.
