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Published: August 13th 2010
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After Cafayate, my next stop was the provincial capital of Salta. The bus ride from Cafayate back through the gorge was once again spectacular, and the journey wasn’t overly long (around 4 hours). Salta is a standard stop on the backpackers’ circuit - the city itself is quite nice, but the surrounding areas in Salta and Jujuy provinces are the main draw. The city is absolutely crawling with travel agencies, more so than anywhere I’ve been since Cusco, but this is good for competition. As I arrived on the weekend before the Argentinean winter holidays ended, prices were being slashed as most tourists headed home. Every agency offered more or less the same tours, but I was only interested in one particular tour, to Cachi and the Calchaquíes Valleys, as this was the only area that I wanted to see and couldn’t get to easily on public transport. So after visiting a few agencies, I found one with a reasonable price (125 pesos: around 22 pounds) for a full day tour for the following day. With this sorted out, I had the rest of the day to explore the city. In some ways I was a bit disappointed with Salta, just
because it has been talked about so much by people I’ve met on the backpacker circuit, but they were probably referring to Salta Province more than the city itself. The city was nice, just not spectacular. Rather standard in fact, with the usual main square with the Cathedral and Cabildo (City Hall) and then a few colonial churches dotted around the grid system. A couple of these, namely the San Francisco church and monastery and the San Bernardo church and monastery were both undeniably beautiful, the former even more so at night. Looming 250 metres above the city is the San Bernardo Hill, which is accessed by path, road or cable car. I decided to walk there and back- about 30 minutes up, and 20 to come down. I noticed coming down that at the bottom there is a sign saying there are over 1000 steps, which I’m glad I didn’t notice going up. The views from the top were worth the climb, despite the thick clouds.
What made Salta stand out from other Argentinean cities was more its Andean character, especially its large population of indigenous people, which made me feel like I was in Peru more than
Argentina. And the many handicraft and souvenir shops and stands, selling more or less the same sort of thing that is sold in Peru (and I imagine Bolivia too). And despite the wealth of the city centre, the poverty (and the slums) in some of the outskirts is something I haven’t really seen so far in Argentina.
The following day I had my tour to Cachi booked. The tour bus picked me up from my hostel, though it was surprisingly early and I wasn’t ready (it was 7am and everyone at the hostel was sound asleep). It took an hour for the bus to pick everyone else up from their hotels (I was the second to be collected) and to get out of the city. I was a) the only foreigner, and b) one of only a few people under the age of 50. The whole trip was very interesting and the guide was excellent - she kept us entertained and informed for the full 12 hours of the trip. We first passed through part of the Lerme Valley, which seemed to be full of tobacco farms. We then passed through into a long gorge, filled with traditional and
isolated farming communities. The guide was telling us that until recently, the highly catholic farmers even performed marriage ceremonies for some of their animals, including giving them chicha (alcohol made from corn). Very strange. But a very beautiful landscape, albeit it getting out of the bus for photos it was freezing. As the rocks which form the gorge contain different minerals, the gorge constantly fluctuated in colour, mostly from red (caused by Iron Oxide) to green (Copper Oxide). The road then reaches the Cuesta del Obispo, or the Bishop’s Slope. This was stunningly beautiful. The road gradually climbed up the sides of the gorge, through banks of cloud, until reaching the top, from where the views over the valley and the clouds below were astonishing. And as we were above the clouds, under the sun, it was much warmer than down below. We spotted some guanacos on one of the hillsides (guanacos are a member of the llama family, but are not domesticated). At this point we entered the Parque Nacional Los Cardones, a national park full of a cactus-like plant called a cardón in Spanish (not sure how that translates into English). The landscape leveled out into a plateau,
with nothing to see but an almost desert landscape, filled with cardones, and the mountainous backdrop. We arrived in Cachi at about 2 in the afternoon, and had an hour to explore the small town before heading back to Salta. Cachi is an extremely isolated village located near the base of Cerro Cachi, one of the highest peaks in Argentina (over 6000m), and which has preserved its colonial roots. Initially I had hoped to come directly here from Cafayate, but public transport in these parts is distinctly lacking. Locals get around on the back of pick-ups - I saw one of these on the road with about 20 people crammed into the back like livestock. That made me feel glad I took the option in doing the tour. The village itself was very picturesque; all buildings were whitewashed and with matching green doors, and every other building seemed to either be a hotel or a souvenir/handicraft shop. An hour was enough to have a look around though. The journey back took us on the same route by which we came (this road incidentally, Ruta 40, runs all the way from the Bolivian border down to Patagonia - some 4500km in
total), though we stopped off again at the Cuesta del Obispo to see how the landscape had changed now that the clouds had disappeared. All in all, a very good tour, with a lot crammed into 12 hours!
The only other place I visited near Salta was the town of San Lorenzo, 10km outside of the city and where there is yet another gorge where you can walk around and explore. It wasn’t that exciting though so I returned back to Salta soon enough. So after a week or so in Salta Province, it was time to move on, with the next stop being the bordering province of Jujuy, which will be my last province in Argentina before crossing into Bolivia. The next blog will come from there.
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