The last bit of Argentina and the first bit of Bolivia

27 September 2010

Kerstin and I hung out in Buenos Aires for just a couple of days before geting another epically long bus journey up to Salta in the northwest of the country.  The bus was quite delayed by some traffic jams and terrible weather, but what we saw of the countryside was absolutely amazing, very green and very flat.
Salta is a lovely wee town, with the standard central square, cathedral etc.  There was a very interesting museum which had these frozen children that had been buried alive (albeit high on chica) on the top of mountains by Incas back in the day.

 

From Salta we took a few tours of the surrounding countryside, an amazing mix of very dramatic mountains, with amazing colours due to lots of different minerals, wine country and salt flats.  I guess we must have been at a reasonable alitude as it was lovely and warm during the day in the sunlight, but it became really cold in the shade or when there was wind and at night.

The hill of seven colours

We then relocated up to a town called Tilcara from where we managed to get ourselves around on local buses to a few more towns just to see more of the scenery and have a look around.

From Tilcara we then bussed it up to the border with Bolivia and spent about an hour waiting to get stamped out of Argentina.  It was much much quicker to get ourselves into Bolivia and we immediately organised a bus to take us up to a town called Tupiza from where we knew we'd be able to arrange our salt flats tour.  The bus was an absolute heap of rusty junk and the "road" was a mix of tarmaced sections running for about 100m, but mainly we were offroading through the desert which was kind of mad.  I was convinced the bus was about to fall over a few times.  And then it broke down!

As if it wasn't hot enough in the middle of the day in the desert, large amounts of steam started to pour through the bus from the engine compartment.  The driver lifted the hatch to the engine (a whole section of aisle) and tried to get the thing going again.  After half an hour we started up again and lasted a whole two minutes before breaking down again!  After another hour or so, another bus finally passed by and kindly pulled in in front of us.  Kerstin hustled off the bus, vaulting over the open engine compartment, to see if the other bus would take us, and I sorted out our bags.  We were extremely lucky in getting seats on the other bus.  I felt really guilty when we drove off leaving 90% of our original bus standing by the side of the road, but we hadn't done anything they couldn't have done.  All very strange.

That evening, the hostel we checked into in Tupiza immediately talked us into a four day tour of salt flats and surrounding countryside starting the following day.  We headed out to the markets to pick up the basics (snacks, toilet paper, batteries) and noticed in the market that quite a few of the stalls had large collections of dried llama foetuses for sale.  Apparently they're gifts to the Pachamama and also get buried in the foundations of houses.  Lovely!