Road Trip! - Salta Province

Steph and Ric Tours!

Some raving lunatic let me and Richard Stopher hire a car and hit the road for an adventure around Argentina. And it was rather excellent fun.

We picked up our Volkswagon Gol (that's right, Gol, without the F) on Sunday morning, the roads were almost traffic free as all the Agentinians were either in church praying to giant wooden puppets or at home making empanadas. We drove south, through a couple of towns, eventually getting to Parque Nacional Los Cardones. We drove up to over 3000m above sea level through the mountains, it was very pretty - the rocks are all different colours. One thing I will say about mountains on this side of the world, they're the real thing; they actually look like they've just been thrust out of the earth by some tectonic movement. Unlike the smooth grassy hills we call mountains at home.

Anyway... we got to Cachi just after lunch time. Its actually a nice little town but it won itself the title "Hell Town" because it was really windy and sand kept blowing in our faces, and we got attacked by a swarm of wasps. Didn't like it. It was also really touristy and full of yet more llama souvenir shops so after lunch we made a swift get away and carried on along Ruta 40.

Ruta 40 is a famous road like Route 66 in America, it runs the whole length of Argentina from north to south and is one of the things you have to do travelling here. However, like the windy town of Cachi, it was pretty awful! The road was unpaved, dusty and bendy, the car was shaking about so much that eventually we had to tie one of Ric's socks around the windscreen wiper to stop the racket it was making. Loose rocks kept flying up and bashing the car and we got lost in a cloud of dust everytime a car went by in the other direction.

Still the landscape was stunning and we drove by several little villages of mud huts.

We impulsively took a rather long and pointless detour off track to Lagunas Brealitos - some lakes in the valley of the mountains. It took us ages to get there and by the time we got our first glimpse of the lakes the sun was already setting and it was getting cold.

We made it to the town of Molinos by 8pm to find everywhere locked up in darkness. Whilst searching for a hostel a lady approached us and offered us a bed in her (or someone elses) house. She claimed it was a hostel but it definitely wasn't. Didn't matter, it was clean and comfortable, although there was no toilet paper which was most inconvenient. The only restaurant in the town that was open on Sunday evening was in a 5* hotel and was verrrry very posh. We staggered in, tired after a long day travelling and covered in a layer of dust from the road, looking like proper gringo rif-raff, and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu (spaghetti and fanta in my case). The hotel was stunning, there was a lit open fire place in every room, and the food was excellent.

The next day whilst having breakfast outside a cafe a couple approached us and asked if they could tag along with us on our way south. They were Natalie and Tom from France and England. The four of us carried on, with our teeth rattling, along ruta 40 until we noticed that the boot had somehow opened itsself. Turns out the excessive shaking of ruta 40 had loosened the nuts in the lock of the boot and it had fallen out. So for the next hour we had a very loud drive to the town of Angastaco with the boot banging open and shut and me worrying that it was going to smash the glass.

After a picnic lunch of empanadas by the river, we found a mechanic who fixed the lock on the boot and we carried on to San Carlos where we had ice creams in the plaza.

As we approached Cafayate, our destination, we stopped off at a vineyard and did some pleasantly free wine tasting. We had a brief tour by a girl who was clearly merry after her 10th or 11th tasting of the day, and we tried 3 wines. The vineyard was called Vasija Secreta.

We managed to find the cheapest hostel in the town, possibly the cheapest in Argentina - it was 25 pesos a night each, just over 3 quid! Then we carried on with our wine tour.

Cafayate, along with Mendoza, is where the majority of Argentinian wine is produced and there are loads of wineries in the town where you can go and sample the vino. We went to 2 more bodegas - El Transito and Figueroa. As the places with free tasting were by now shutting shop for the day, we moved on to the bars in the plaza.

We ended up in a restaurant that had a peña show. Peñas are evenings of traditional folklore music and dancing. We had a very nice meal there (more steak), more wine, and enjoyed the live music. 

The next day, with slight hangovers, we drove back up north through La Quebrada de Cafayata, - more mountains. There were plenty of stops along the way visiting interesting rock formations such as Los Colorados, El Obelisco, El Amifteatro and La Garganta del Diablo which I proudly climbed to the top of in my flip flops and summer dress.

We said goodbye to Natalie and Tom along the way and they headed back down South whilst we carried on north to Alemania, apparently a ghost town although there were clearly people living there. There was a big railway bridge across the river which Ric played on whilst I watched a family who'd managed to get their car stuck in the river. They'd managed to flag down help from a guy in a jeep, who in turn got his own car stuck! It was most amusing. They asked us for help but Ric just mumbled "no entiendo español" and we made a run for it - yeah we're bad people but we didn't want our Gol to be the river's third victim!

Next stop was at Dique de Cabra Corral, a big damn where you can do "extreme sports" such as bungee jumping. Ric was going to do a bungee jump but he changed his mind when we got there and realised the bridge that you jump off is only a couple of meters high and that you can probably jump off it without the bungee.

We had some food by the edge of the damn, "best pejerrey in Argentina" - apparently (it was just fish and chips). And we saw the most ridiculous boats! They were like caravans and buses stacked up on top of one another with some floating device at the bottom.

After some more driving, stopping and silliness we made it back to Salta in one piece and dropped the car off, forgetting to mention the breaking of the boot.