Geo: -30.9834, -64.5So far, my favorite and certainly the cleanest town we've visited in all of Argentina. Beautiful, well manicured plazas and an attractive downtown business area are just a small part of it's charm.The hills above offer great para-gliding and beautiful scenery from below. Today was a cloudy, grey day, but we decided to play golf at La Cumbre Golf Club.The home course of Angel Cabrerra and for you non-golfers, he's the Tiger Woods of Argentina and won the Masters a few year's back on the American professionals tour.Since he was too chicken to show up, I had to play with Karen. We paid for our greens fee and rented one set of clubs to use between the two of us, purchased 6 golf balls that would have been rejected by the Village Greens driving ... read more

Geo: -25, -64.5After breakfast a bird couldn't live on, we had to turn around and head back for Salta. We told Angie we were STARVING, but it wasn't until Humahuaca three hours later, that we got to eat. This is hard country with few services, so when you come, come prepared. Even though these open markets and stalls are operated by very poor people, the streets surrounding them are absolutely immaculate. They are always sweeping and cleaning and keeping their areas neat. They obviously have pride that the poor people of Montevideo do not. It was in stark contrast last evening when we walked back to the hotel from dinner. The streets were alive with papers and bags flying in the breeze, but in the morning everything was clean.But the border crossing! It was worth the ... read more

Geo: -23.7334, -65.5After checking into our hotel in Purmamarca we headed up over the pass towards Chile to find the Salinas Grandes, the salt flats.The road took us up into the clouds on our windy way, then dropped us out onto the desolate alta plano where shepherds gather twigs for a fire to keep warm at night.We were over 4,000 meters high--13,681 feet in altitude.These salt flats are about 40 km long and 26 km wide, but this is just one of many areas thick with salt. The whole northern Argentina/southern Bolivia area has gigantic salt flats. Bolivia has the highest salt flats in the world, but then Bolivia has the highest everything in the world.Local Indians have been exploited for hundreds of years, but now they work in the salt only if they want to. ... read more

Geo: -25.2667, -65.4833I love waking to the sounds of birds chirping. Otherwise, it's very quiet here like everybody's gone back to where ever they came from and left the place to us. We've walked back down to this little restaurant by the bridge that we came to last night and the place is almost deserted. But there was a guy bungee jumped off the bridge just now--guess it's never to slow for inanity. Yesterday there was a big party going on here with lots of 20 year olds dancing to live music and an abundance of frolicking. There's a jump, water slide, river rafting, something that looks like rappelling off the bridge and another thing where they just hang there and swing back and forth. The bridge evidently is a very big draw.I've included some pictures ... read more

Geo: -26.9468, -65.2857The sound of rain drumming on rooftops was drowned out this afternoon by the drumming of the Trabajadores de Augustin Tosco--the workers of Augustin Tosco marching slowly down the grey street below us. Soggy banners drooped above the soaked crowd as they moved peacefully through the sloppy afternoon.Tucuman is a city built on sugarcane and sugar makes for fabulous wealth while exploiting the poor, so we weren't surprised to see the march, but sad to know there's so much unrest in a country we love.We no sooner got into our room at the Gran Premier hotel in Tucuman than we heard loud drumming in the street below. The socialist party of Argentina was marching, A socialist party anyway--there's more than one. There wasn't a lot of passion displayed--they all looked wet and bored except ... read more