Salta, a 5 day road trip.... up up and away!

 The delightful church in Salta greeted us after an overnight 1st class bus journey from the Jesuit Missions. A wonderful very pretty town which had a lot to offer including some great museums. We have come to the conclusion that to run a museum in Argentina what is of primary importance is a really really eccentric curator and Salta's ethnographic museum had certainly taken this on board.

 A Salta house complete with flowers.

We decided after a couple of urban days in Salta that this was the first place where it would be possible and worth hiring a car. The first in our entire trip, so a day after running round to car hire places and getting quotes we took the cheapest we could find, an old Ford Ka with too many miles on the clock, a cracked windscreen and a few bumps and scrapes already on it and took off on a 1250 km road trip into the uplands of northern Argentina on what was an unforgettable expedition. We consulted our hotel owner in Salta and armed with a small map and a spare bottle of water headed off.

 Heading south for the wine growing town of Cafayate we first came across this reservoir Dique Cabra Corral, a sharp still morning resulted in some great reflections.

 We drove up the Valles Cachaquies into stunning rock formations and colours, the like of which neither of us had ever seen before

 Note me in this picture - just to give some idea of scale!!

 We arrived in Cafayate where we went to the local museum where once again we encountered a typical Argentinian museum curator with the full range of absolutely necessary eccentricities, this one believing despite all evidence to the contrary that we spoke perfect Spanish and acted accordingly. She did have however one of the most astounding collections of burial pots from the pre Inca civilisation which had some amazing intricate patterns.

We then toured a couple of the local wine tasting establishments and bought a bottle to have in the evening.... very nice too.

That evening we encountered some fellow tourists one of whom being Australian insisted on kicking up the hostel BBQ and doing steak. There was however a surfeit of Englishmen present so in a town which boasts,as we were told while testing wine, 340 days of sun a year, it rained!

The rain however was of real use, firstly to the local vineyards who were very pleased about it but also to us as it fell as snow on the high ground and for the rest of our trip we had snow covered mountain tops!

 Day 2 saw us drive the 200 km of dirt track roads to Catchi in the middle of nowhere. We had to stop when this guy and his mate were driving this very reluctant bull towards us down the road. We first thought that they were having real issues but quickly discovered that this was not the case it was the bull who was having the issues..... they came past us on the way from not a clue to not another clue.... we had seen no signs of habitation for about 30 miles!

 Our lunch stop at Molinos, this churches roof inside was made of cactus wood and was really spectacular.

Cachi was a beautiful town where we spent a quite cold night the following morning we began a long drive to San Antonio de los Cobres, having to take a 150 km detour from the straightest route as we did not have 4 wheel drive, we had not really realised that for the past 2 days we had been climbing up and up and arrived at this summit on the road.

It was a little windy!

 We coasted down this road - I measured 15 km of not touching the accelerator with the car in neutral.

Once down to about 1400 m we then immediately started to climb up this valley again feeling really intrepid, here's Liza being an intrepid exploring woman!

 Heading up and up and up we found Lamas! these were really helpful and stood still enough for photographs.

Arriving in San Antonio we found that the hostel we were expecting to stay was shut and the only other hotel in town was way outside our price range we discovered this gentleman who ran the local mud hut hostel for locals which is where we ended up spending the night. He also insisted on taking us on a tour of the local sights which were this hill in the background. This was the highest part of our trip at about 4500 m

This viaduct which used to take ore from the silver mine nearby which is where our guide used to work

 And the local hot spring, here with a plastic water bottle on top

Our host's mud hut - with corrugated iron and uninsulated  roof was not the warmest place we have ever stayed but once rolled up in the blankets we were warm enough although the 4000 m altitude was a bit of an issue! It was also my dad's birthday which made the chances of a skype call to wish him the best a bit of a non-starter.

 From San Antonio we drove to Humahuaca,  a 70 km of dirt tracks round salt flats and over frozen streams before again finding tarmac with another amazing coast down the mountains, this time 25 km without going near the accelerator to Purmamarca with the amazing coloured mountains in the background where lunch was enjoyed.

Humahuaca provided us with an interesting restaurant which served Lama. A very lean meat which we decided could be served to a vegetarian who had been told it was a vege-burger without them knowing. A very fine grained bland meat which we thought was OK if you could not get beef which is not a particular issue in Argentina.

From there via a tropic we headed back to Salta.

We stopped at Tilcara where there are some pre Inca ruins which have been thoroughly worked over by reconstructionalist archaeologists to an extent that would have had them hounded out of the UK

Turning lines of stones where buildings had stood as seen above into what may have been there at the time like below!

My last shot is of this superb vista from the road of one of the local graveyards with the multicoloured mountains behind. Now we are back into Salta our hire car returned, we are planning on getting a bus to Bolivia tomorrow.