Advertisement
Buenos Aires
Boca Juniors mural in the Caminito district We arrived back in Buenos Aires on 7 April for a final two nights in the city.
Unfortunately, two of the sites we had wanted to visit (the Fundacion Proa art gallery and the Teatro Colon) were closed for renovation. We did visit the Caminito, an area of the working class Boca district that is home to artists and a variety of coloured buildings. We also took the opportunity to catch up on emails, and spent a long morning extracting Pesos from ATMs (each transaction is limited to about GBP45 worth) so we could acquire some US$ before we travelled north.
From Buenos Aires we took an overnight bus to Mendoza, the centre of Argentina's wine industry, with 70% of the country's wine produced in the region.
We arrived on the morning of 10 April, my (33rd!) birthday. After fourteen hours on the bus, we wanted nothing more than a quiet day, so after a very good pasta lunch, we spent the afternoon walking around the town's pleasant plazas and relaxing in its park.
The following day, Sarah took me to a local winery for a five-course lunch, each course served with a (small) glass of wine.
Buenos Aires
The artistic Caminito district The setting was beautiful, and both the food and wine very good. I played the 'its my birthday' card strongly, and it was nine glasses of wine later, at 4pm, that we returned to town.
The following day we boarded a bus for the eighteen hour ride north to Salta. The bus journey was a little tiresome, mainly due to the very loud and violent films that were played for most of the trip (the first film shown, on a bus with a number of young children, featured numerous killings, violent sex and rape - one for the family!). The only positive was the on-board bingo (sadly, we didn't win).
After a night in Salta, we went to a local estancia (farm) to celebrate Sarah's 27th birthday with a horse-riding trip. We spent two days on the farm, rising late to a good breakfast, riding for three hours, eating a large asado (BBQ) lunch, and then riding for a further three hours before settling in for tea and dinner.
We had a truly memorable two days, but by the end, were both in agony. In particular, eating a large BBQ accompanied by several glasses of wine is
Buenos Aires
The artistic Caminita district not recommended prior to a long ride, especially one which included some cantering and even bare-back riding.
Sarah used to ride regularly, and seemed to love the whole experience. She was also given a birthday cake and a bottle of champagne to take back to our room after dinner (given the machismo that exists in Argentine culture, I received a lot of abuse from the farm manager when we admitted we'd collapsed into bed exhausted having drunk barely a glass between us).
It was also fantastic to watch the gaucho guides riding - they are amazing on a horse. Our guide on the first day said he'd first been on a horse at six months, and by his fourth birthday was riding solo. Similarly, he'd already carried his baby son on his horse.
We returned to Salta for a visit to the Museo de Arqueologia de Alta Montana (the Museum of High Mountain Archaeology), which detailed an expedition to recover three mumified Inca-child sacrifices from the summit of a nearby volcanoe. We hadn't appreciated that the Incas sacrificed their children, and whilst the museum was somewhat disturbing, it also provided a very interesting insight into Inca culture
and customs.
Apparently, the Inca culture sacrificed children in a ritual called capacocha. The first corpse ever recovered, in 1995 (and not on display in Salta) was a girl who had died from a blow to the skull - other methods of sacrifice included strangulation and simply leaving the children, who had been given an intoxicating drink, to lose consciousness in the extreme cold and low-oxygen conditions of the mountaintop, and to die of exposure. Their frozen corpses are still being discovered in the South American mountaintops.
From Salta, we embarked on Thursday 17 April on an exhausting, but fantastic, three-night trip to San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile.
San Pedro is about ten hours from Salta, and the bus crosses the Paso de Jama at 4,200m. Having woken at 6am, we arrived in San Pedro late on Thursday afternoon, and immediately booked three tours for the next two days.
We had a dreadful night´s sleep on arrival in San Pedro - although the village is only at 2,400m the high altitude on the bus journey during the day left us feeling nauseous and suffering from insomnia. We spent most of the Thursday night awake,
Buenos Aires
On the way to the Boca Juniors' match before crawling out of bed at 3.40am to travel to some geysers 90km away (it was a 4am pick up from our hostel, as the geysers are best viewed at sunrise).
Sarah spent the early part of the tour with stomach cramps, although these eased after drinking coca tea (coca tea, or mate de coca, is made using the leaves of the coca plant. The leaves of the coca plant contain several alkaloids, including cocaine. The consumption of coca tea increases the absorption of oxygen into blood, which helps combat altitude sickness).
Geysers are only found in four countries aside from Chile, being the US, New Zealand, Iceland and Russia (they are hot springs, and not to be confused with fumeroles, which are a steam vent). The geysers were wonderful and we also saw various desert scapes and catci on our return to town, as well as llamas, guanacos and vicunas (all members of the llama family), reaching San Pedro just after 1.30pm.
This gave us less than an hour before our second tour to the Valley of Death (where we ran down 300m sand-dunes and saw some more amazing desert scenery) and the Valley of the
Buenos Aires
At a Boca Juniors' match Moon, from where we watched the sunset. We ate an early dinner, and after an unpleasant cold shower, went to bed.
The following morning (Saturday) we were picked up at 7am for a full day trip to see flamingoes on the nearby salt flats, where three of the world's six species are found. We also visited some high altitude lakes and local villages. It was fantastic, and we met some really nice people on our tour (especially a young Dutch couple), although to say we were shattered by the time we returned to San Pedro that evening is an understatement. On Sunday, we repeated the ten hour bus ride, back to Salta. It was an unbelievable four days.
We have since travelled into Bolivia, and are currently in La Paz. We will send you the details of our time in Bolivia shortly.
In the meantime, here are the photos, including a few shots that Sarah took at the Boca game in early April that we´ve only just burnt to CD . . . I thought they were worth sharing!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.102s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 61; dbt: 0.0573s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb