Travels

Click here for pictures from Salta. Another sunny, beautiful day in Salta. Our last day and night before heading to Cafayate, the land of delicious white wine, particularly a variety known as Torontes. For a final fun experience, half of our group decided we´d go out for a half day of horseback riding, then a lazy afternoon in the city, hence my time to blog right now. Argentineans in this region are definitely leaning towards more of a desert-like frontier, and that means there are plenty of cowboys and riding to be done. They apparently don´t ride western style. I didn´t know what that meant. The short version is that they have diferent saddles, and use only one hand, rather than two on western style. I was quite excited to do this, in spite of the fact that I really have no horse experience. This will come into play later in my story, believe me 😉 The start to our day was a little confusing, as we hadn´t really been given much information on how the day was arranged, ultimately, we were picked up by two taxis at 9:30, and headed to a place called San Lorenzo, which I think is a rich enclave not far from Salta, the land is much more lush, and the houses quite large. As the cowboys put it, mucho deniro. read on.

Click here for pictures from Salta. Howdy folks, well, I´ve got a rare bit of free time to write up a post in the sort-of middle of the day. It´s just around 4:30, and I just got back from my lunch, and have free time till 8pm, so let´s just pick it up where we left off and talk about yesterdays journey. I talked about getting on the train to the clouds, and then subsequently finding out it would be a mini-bus to the clouds. I´ll have to be honest though, sometimes, these little changes are just what you need. This tripped proved to be well worth it. Although by the end of the trip, we all agreeed that these particular clouds weren´t very soft and fluffy, and could use a spot of pavement 🙂 As it turns out, the road we travelled was pretty bumpy, and filled with lots of cargo trucks laden with lithium brine and borax. These are some of the things that get mined from the salt flats that exist in the altiplano at high altitudes between here and Bolivia. We got an early start to our day, boarding the bus at 8am. The trip was to last for about 12 hours, and we had a great guide named Pablo to fill us in on all the gory details of the areas we´d be seeing. read on…

Click here for pictures from Salta. Geez, I totally forgot to mention. So, on the great football game day, not only did our team win, but Air Canada scored a small victory. When we returned to the hotel, the missing bag had shown up! If it could write a blog, I’m sure it would be interesting, but sadly, we can only ever guess at the route it took to get back to us. But it did. Fully intact. Huzzah, vacation angst spared. One more thing to note, if heading to a football match, shirts are 30pesos before the game. Afterwards, you can score the same one for 20 pesos (7 bucks), so I’m now sitting in my ‘away’ jersey for river, a nice adidas tech shirt (well, let’s be honest, Adidas has no idea this shirt exists, hence adidas with the lower case a).

Click here for pictures from Salta. Okay, last post for the night, to catch you up. It’s getting late here (now in Salta), and I’ve got a 7:30am bus to catch for our next tour. We’ll be up at 4200m tomorrow, so i should rest now. We’re doing the ‘train to the clouds’, well make that the ‘mini-bus to the clouds’, as the train, for maybe political, maybe physical reasons, hasn’t been running in a year. Oh well. The past 26 hours were long for sure. The bus ride was only 19.5 hours, which was shorter than expected. the bus itself was something to behold. Picture first class in an airplane. Yup, like that. Only quieter. There were many movies, and the seats layed flat to sleep. I brought on a nice bottle of red wind, and some beer to pass the time. We were also fed once on the bus, and stopped twice for included meals. All in all, a first class experience. It didn’t seem anywhere near that long. Also gave us time to get to know some co-travellers. We’ve got a really nice group of twelve people. We all get along very well now. more…

Click here for photos from this day. Well folks, when in Rome, do as the Romans, but when in Argentina, one must certainly do as the Argentinians do, and that’s exactly how we siezed a unique opportunity on the 22nd. When we awoke, we were expecting a group meeting, and then boarding a bus for Salta (a 20 hour ride). Instead, we were told the bus didn’t leave until 10pm, so we had another full day in the Paris of South America. While we were initially bothered, since we’d mentally prepared ourselves for the long ride, this did open other opportunities. The two that came to mind were that first off, the next Air Canada flight got in at 2pm, so there was an off chance Jody might be re-united with her bag, if it hadn’t been lifted off the carousel. The second was the fact that later that day the River football team would be playing a home game. This is huge in BsAs, and we were interested in taking part. Read on…