Hitchin' a Ride

Hello all. Time is ticking and I´m on a shared hostel computer so lets get started. First of all a wee sedgeway, congratulations to Isa and James for the birth of their baby boy Luka. Hooray!

Our second stop in Argentina was originally going to be a transfer to another bus but on the recommendation of a mormon guy we met briefly in Tilcara we thought we ought to stay a night in San Salvador de Jujuy. On our arrival in the middle of the afternoon we discovered a dead quiet city with closed and shuttered shops, empty streets and abandoned cafés. This was our first experience of the strictly adhered argentine custom of "the siesta", where everything is closed from lunch to around 5pm. One flipside of this was that while the banks are closed, everyone queues madly outside waiting for it to reopen. The queue in the photo, which may have been tax return day or something, stretched right to the end of the block, maybe 400m! Once things started to reopen, Jujuy strangely reminded us of Hong Kong, with huge neon signs and banners stretched across the streets.

In Jujuy we went for a mission out of town to some thermal pools which were nestled in a valley overlooking a river. The trip out there on the bus was particularly picturesque, taking us through some of the first green countryside we had seen in months.

As food here in Argentina is a bit pricier, we´ve started preparing our own meals again which means exploring food markets and trying to learn all the multitude of spanish words for cuts of meat (it seems asking for meat of cow doesn't work too well!). In our next stop of Salta, we had a run in with an unexpected problem at the market. While wandering and browsing to find a cheap market restaurant for lunch we found ourselves mobbed by waitresses trying to get us to buy from their restaurant. We were surrounded by almost a dozen all yabbering at us, some laughing, some grabbing us and pulling, none of them listening to our insistence on being left alone. We did the cowardly thing and ran like hell. After regrouping outside we came up with a plan. We hurried back inside with our heads down and sat down at the first tables we could find. Whew!

Other highlights of Salta included walking up San Bernado´s hill with its views over the city. During this we found out what people do in the middle of the day when they´re not working, they exercise! There were all sorts running, walking, puffing and stretching their way up and down the hill.

We decided to have a bit of a night out on our last night in Salta and headed to the bar district to find a peña. We discovered that the big city peña experience was to be quite different from the cozy club in Tilcara. The bands were very professional, the wine was very fancy and the food was completely dominating. It was our first "parillada" or argentine barbeque which is served on a grill stoked with hot coals and for the two of us consisted of 2 steaks; 3 chops; 2 sausages; 5 slices of kidney; 1 slice of liver and a pile of long stringy intestine. We polished it all off, apart from the intestine which tasted a bit too much like I thought intestine would taste like, and at the end of the night we waddled out with stuffed bellies.

Our plan was to take the long way from Salta to our next planned stop at Cafayate in our usual "off the beaten track" search. This involved staying a night in a spanishy small town called Cachi where we hired bikes for the afternoon and pedalled up a pretty valley. The next day we planned to hitch hike to Cafayate as there were no buses that went all the way, unfortunately this was a Sunday morning and like Sunday mornings throughout the continent, nothing was happening. After standing at the outskirts of town for 3 hours, waving our thumbs around and talking to a local goat herder for some time, we gave up and reverted to plan B. Plan B involved taking 2 buses and hiring a private car to arrive wearily in Cafayate.