Como se llama esta llama?

After two weeks in Argentina it is time to move on to Bolivia, where I´ll be heading tomorrow. It is a mere seven hour bus journey to the border, where I will have to walk to Bolivia - hopefully without any delays - and stay at a hostel on the border town of Villazon. From there I will hopefully be going to the Salar DÚyuni, the biggest salt flat on Earth. It is over 4,000 metre up on the Bolivian altiplano: a desolate, treeless plateau that gets to about -20 degrees at night.

I am still currently in Salta, mainly because there has been so many places to see around the province. On Saturday I went to a small mining town called San Antonio de los Cobres, a savagely dry and windy backwater on the Argentinian puna. However, it is the journey there that makes it worthwhile - the tour guides took us between spiralling roads through towering mountains, and through pretty indigenous villages selling Andean handicrafts (alpaca clothes and rugs, Inca ornaments, miniature pan pipes and earthenware pots seem to be the only items on offer at artesanian markets. Still, you can never have enough earthenware pots). We also visited Las Gran Salinas, a salt flat in the puna, which, as you may imagine, is a snooker table of a landscape made only of salt. Surrounded by desert, the salt flat doesn´t even have the desert cacti to absorb the punishing wind that screams all around it. It was amazing to see people living nearby - it is a harsh place to stand around in for half an hour taking pictures, let alone to actually live there. Its difficult to imagine how people can survive in such a hostile place. It didn´t even have a Pret a Manger, if you can fathom such a thing.

The third and final tour of my trip to Salta was to Cafayate, a delightful village to the south with vineyards and wineries. As well as wine tasting and a pleasant lunch in the village, the tour takes you through staggering gorges of multicoloured rock, reminiscent of Nevada. It is a geologist´s Eden here - a lot of the rock is sandstone, which has been battered into all kinds of astonishing shapes over the millions of years they have been here. Our charismatic guide, Fernando, gave us a potted history of plate tectonics in the area, explaining how the Andes are getting even bigger, thanks to the Nazca oceanic plate still colliding with the South American continental plate, forcing the mountains ever higher by the second. This geological phenomenon pleases Fernando, for one day his much-maligned neighbours in to the west will be sent to their doom under the advancing oceanic crust. I fear he will have to wait several million years for his Chilean apocalypse though. He told also told me he was going to be staying in in a village south of Glasgow next year to improve his English. I wished him the very best of luck with that...

I also had an altercation with the world´s most famous llama that day. I say most famous, until that day I
couldn´t name one llama in the world. Now I am acquainted with Thalia (if you are reading Mr Turner, she wasn´t as pretty as the TV listings leviathan with the same name) who poses for pictures with passing tourists. Fernando warned us that she might spit at you if you are unlucky - and it will not be a pleasant sauce for your clothes to be marinaded in for the rest of the day. Well, only one of the seven of us on our tour who had our picture taken with Thalia was unlucky. Thankfully, I did manage to dodge the bullet, but only just. (Editors note: Spanish speakers will hopefully appreciate the pun in the title of this blog. I´m sure I am not the first person to think of it but it did make me laugh for most of the rest of the day.)

PS there are no pictures yet as I have brought the wrong usb cable to upload them, so will have to go and buy one from somewhere...

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