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Published: August 7th 2007
Igauzu Falls
Even though it looks like we are really good photographers, apparently there is a rainbow at this spot every day!With Bolivia behind us it was time for some decadence - Argentinian style!
Of course this means quality wine, thicker-than-your-thigh steaks and five star class buses - hardly ´roughing it´. Our first stop in Argentina was Salta , but it took an interesting couple of bus rides to get there...
Getting to the Bolivian/Argentinian border meant a 4 am bus ride along a dirt road, on a bus that would have looked more suited to the set of a Mad Max movie than to ferrying passengers. But as always we arrived in one piece, at the freezing border town of Villazon and its Argentine counterpart La Quiaca. Once over the border it was a different story altogether. The bus left on time, was clean, the roads were PAVED, and onboard was a machine serving copious amounts of hot sweet coffee - the perfect nerve settler after the bone jarring Bolivian trip.
Salta was just a nice place to be... tree lined streets, great restaurants - a real ´European´feel. We climbed to the top of the nearby hill to appreciate the views over the town. At that stage we were still nestled up in the Andes, despite having come
down from 3700m to about 1800. Some say that after having been up at such a high altitude for so long, you experience an oxygen high when you come back down, although we didn´t really feel it.
From Salta we made a great little side trip to the town of Cafayate, famous for it´s wine production, where we stayed two nights. We followed the same path as in Mendoza earlier and hired bikes to tour the wineries. I have to say that this is the best way to do wineries - even if it is a bit harder to ride in a straight line by the end of the day. Cafayate´s most famous wine is a white variety called Torrens, but the Cab Sauv wasn´t bad either. Lunch was the biggest cheese platter the world has ever seen!
After Cafayate, we made our way back to Salta and on to Corrientes for a couple of nights. To be honest, not a lot to report here. Looked around shops and then moved on to Posadas. Posadas sits over the river from Paraguay. Whereas some border towns we have visited can be a bit seedy, this was really nice. With
One of the wineries in Cafayate
with the Andes in the background the Andes in the background we found ourselves sat a riverside cafe having a couple of beers looking over to Paraguay over the other side. As we travelled further east the weather was starting to get more tropical, leaving behind the dusty, arid land in Bolivia and north west Argentina.
Posadas is not too far from Jesuit ruins in San Ignacio, and this was our next stop. The ruins were set up by an Italian missionary in the early 1600´s for the local indigenous populations. The jesuits were kicked out by the spanish a couple of centuries later but the ruins make for an interesting day trip. They are really well preserved.
After our trip to Posadas it was time to make our way to Igazu falls on the Argentian and Brazilian border. After and extremely fast bus ride we arrived in Igazu, ate some more steak, drank more red wine and headed out the next day to the falls. The national park where the falls are located is beautiful, swarming with brilliantly coloured butterflies, toucan´s and strange animals that look like a cross between possums and anteaters. The park even has jaguar´s, not that we saw any.
Chris on his bike
We hired bikes for the day only to realise that we could of walked to the wineries in about ten minutes. The falls themselves were unbeleivably powerful and beautiful.
After Igauzu we headed down towards Argentina´s capital, Buenos Aires via Santa Fe and Rosario (20 hours by bus). In Santa Fe we made a brief stop where we looked around some local museum´s and even went for a jog around the lake because the wine, beer and all of the junk we have been eating started to take its toll on our waistlines. In Rosario, there was not much to do apart from go shopping and eat. So that´s exactly what we did before heading to Buenos Aires.
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Amanda
non-member comment
Anteater possum thing?
Oh you guys are provincial little 'uns, aint ya?! What a classic, to benchmark against Australian wildlife which is officially recognised worldwide as the weirdest, most mis-shapen and bizarre in the known universe (to wit, playtpus). You crack me up. Also loved the dismissal of Corrientes....those poor ragamuffins, generations devoted to working on finger-puppets only to be told..."over it!". As always, loving the blog and the tres glam makeup and love seat.