Steaks and Guochos!

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So today which was just a beautiful chilled out day. We were up at 6.30, collected by our bus at 7 and set out for Cachi, cachi is a small town west of Salta ( salta is the town we are staying in for the last 4 days, north west Argentina), The drive was amasing, we drove through valleys and gorges reaching 3500ft, these mountains are part of the Andes. There is one part that just takes your breath away, Its called the mountains of colour, it literally is full of colours, vivid reds, cobalt blues, mossy green, burnt oranges. There are several different minerals within in the mountain face, red is iron, blue is silver, green is cooper and yellow is sulpher, It was a really sunny bright day today so the mountains were alive with colour. IT WAS SO BEAUTIFUL... we stopped for lunch in a lovely little place and we tucked into yet another tasty seasoned perfectly BBQ staek and a glass of the local Red which is just fab, we were looking at the snow capped Andes that basically hit you in the face...It was perfect.....

Our stay in Argentina has been unreal, This country is wonderful, the people are so friendly, i love getting to practice spanish with them, so helpful and humble people.

Another high light of ours was our stay on a ranch, it was deadly, We arrived at 11AM and was greeted by the head Gaucho, who lives there with his family ( we meet two of this daughters) then we had a look around, very basic and really charming, the yard with full of horses and Cactus spread across the place, we immediately started talking in our wild west accents, at one stage in mid trek we got so carried away Orla stated she was on the road searching for Billy Joel, i nearly fell off my horse laughing... The horse riding was so much fun, we have never been riding before but by the end of the day we were all galloping across open fields, so exciting, we did 5 hours in total, we rode up into the mountains and the route down was so steep, little tracks over water and big rocks, my horse did me proud... We ate like queens at lunch, Asado (BBQ) on the menu of course, and red wine that just kept flowing. . After lunch more riding, we are pros at this stage.. We finished riding and then got a Lasso lessons, I (ann-marie) was pure crap, Milagro the Guacho informed us that his 6 year old could do it better ( v embarrassed), however Orla got it first time...and we have this tremendous moment captured on video! The rest of the evening we just chilled, drank so much red wine and had a great laugh listening to Irish music on the ipod speakers and explaining what it all meant, I think at one stage we were listening to Sinead o Connor and all we could say is "she is Loco"..... We ate a traditional stew again at 12am and drank more and more, played cards...This ranch was an old convent , it still had a church , it was 50 km from civilisation and we loved every second of it, hardly slept that night a storm blew in, plus our room had so many holy beads and crosses...spooky stuff even with barrels of wine in us...


I think Buenos Aires deserves a whole blog to its self, the place is sooooooooo great beautiful amasing, exciting, fun, crazy... oh good times....so to be continued


We´re working on uploading pics to blog and facebook but the internet is really slow plus we cant find a dvd drive anywhere...oh plus the keyboards are different here so excuse the typos!

Ok were off to sit by the pool and eat.....yet another giant steak, bring it on

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