Far Northwest Argentina (22-29/Mar/06)

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

In Mendoza we recovered Esther's thermal shirts, sent by the Bariloche hostel by bus. We also bought a handle for the kitchen pots, so our luggage was more or less complete again by the time we got to Salta. Here we checked in to a hostel near the centre and headed off to the tourist office to work out what we were supposed to be doing.

Apparently one of the main things is a 2-day tour South of Salta, visiting small villages set in some amazing rock formations. The tour was quite expensive, but for a little extra we found you can hire a taxi driver all to yourself and go in style, stopping when and where you want, and basically giving you much greater flexibility. The woman at the tourist office even recommended a guy, which we phoned and arranged to leave the next day. Sadly this idiot was only recommended to us because he was the woman's boyfriend.

The route was amazing - the first day you start amongst greenery, and slowly this gives way to more rocky and cactusy scenery. Here our taxi driver admitted to us he wasn't sure if the valley formations were from before or after Noah's Ark. My money is on before. We had lunch at a small picturesque village called Cachi and headed off to the unpaved part of the route. Here you see some really amazing formations. We also stopped by a huge carpet of peppers being set out the sun to dry (and later turned into paprika). After so many stops we reached the next village (Cafayate) at nightfall, after some pretty hairy rally driving by a crap driver.

Instead of letting us explore and walk around the village on our own the driver, who must have been feeling bored or lonely or something, decided to stick with us throughout the whole evening and even join us for dinner. But his best trick was to loose the car keys the next morning. He claimed he had gone out for a walk as he couldn't sleep, but later on we found out he had been on the piss. We were quite happy, as we could now bugger off to Salta by bus and redo this on a cheap day tour and be rid of Mr Macho but sadly he found them while we were having an early lunch. The best bit of the route was from here to Salta, but the weather wasn't with us, and we also had to concentrate on the driver and stop him falling asleep at the wheel.

Back in Salta still in one piece we spent an extra day seeing the town, and then headed north to see a few more villages. In Tilcara we did a small hike (which should help to get used to the altitude for Bolivia), and saw the local ruins and museum (free Monday's, result!). The next day the plan was to get to a very picturesque village called Iruya, which also has a very good 7h hike, but just missed the bus connection (chased it in a taxi, but no luck as the taxi was probably slower than the bus) at Humahuaca (saw a monument to the tropic of Cancer, or is it Capricorn, on the way) so we admitted defeat (next bus was to late, and we didn't have any extra days as we had already bought the bus to Chile). We had a walk around Humahuaca and then headed back south to Purmamarca.

We had 2 nights instead of one at Purmamarca until Chile so we chilled out a bit, saw the "mountain of 7 colours" (amazing), walked round the village and nearby rocks, and did some home improvement (washed tent, fixed mattress puncture). Next stop Chile via the Jama pass (4200m) where we'll reach up to 4800m above sea level. And we forgot to buy coke leaves.