Wild Wild West

After the skydive we stayed one more day in cordoba before heading north to Salta. The guys we jumped with got our bus up to Salta so we all got a hostel together, big dorm room of 6; it was small, cheap and very cold! They were all lovely and we spent the next 4 days with them. When we had dumped our bags we headed off to climb a hill on the edge of the city, it was pretty hot surprisingly and so we were all wearing a few too many clothes, it got a bit chilly when we were sitting in the cafe at the top though. The view was amazing you could see the whole city below and the mountains in the distance (thats right Dad ive got off my lazy bum and done a bit of walking! 1070 steep steps to the top!) Drew ran the whole thing... silly child. Our camera got stolen at the bus station in Cordoba and we didnt notice until we were on the bus to Salta so couldn´t do anything about it. We spent the next afternoon in the police station trying to get a report for it, luckily the other English people spoke very good spanish and were able to translate. We are terrible and end up reverting to French when we cant find the right words, they dont understand that any better. We went on a wine tour the next day to a sweet little town called Cafayate. The trip there was pretty amazing through the mountains and we got to climp up some rocks on the way there. Bit disappointing because of our lack of camera as the scenery was amazing! We tried all their wine but we wernt too impressed, the red wine especially was not good. However, they did have some pretty awesome wine ice cream, yum. There was a big BBQ at the hostel that night which was fun, good meat and free wine. On our last day in Salta we went on a horse trek, it was really good fun but I was shoved on the biggest, fattest horse and my legs could deffinately feel it the next day. We headed North up to a little town called Tilcara, it was in a valley surrounded by mountains and looked like it had come straight out of a Western. They had an authentic South American market there but everything was a complete rip off and as we were heading to Bolivia the next day we decided to wait and buy alpaca jumpers later. We stayed in a house run by some really cool hippy guys, they gave us loads of beer and taught Drew to play the Charango, Si. Has to have been the coldest night yet though, we slept in all our clothes and loads of blankets, could still feel the cold! Today we left Tilcara to go to another little town called Humahuaca on our way to La Quiera, the border town to Bolivia. We crossed the border at about 2 and realised that my debit card had been stolen! Not been a good week for keeping track of our items. On the plus side there is a huge black market for cameras here and we are going to buy a new one tomorrow before hitting the salt flats on Saturday. (Google the saltflats in Bolivia and you will see the kind of cool pictures we want to take). Bolivia is alot cheaper than Argentina, we have already stocked up on the alpaca gloves and hats in preparation for the salt flats which apparently gets to -15 at night, and we thought it was cold here!!!!

Drew´s Summary

As a professional Charangoist, I feel I can buy a poncho and hippie my way through the cactus mountains surviving on coca alone. I battled many dogs and conquered a weird rock formation thingy, like a kinda massive cave thats kinda all wrong and stuff with funny lines and you get confuzzelled because it looks like you´re looking straight ahead when you looking up. Well the moral of the story is that I defeated it. I also feel I contributed to the problem that is endangered cows of Argentina, luckily Bolivia seems to serve most of their food with a variety of mystery meat, one was chicken and one was definately dodo. I have also set my sighs on a dream camera, for those of you that care, 16x zoom and 10.2 megapixels, sweet. How I love yet hate the black market. Steal my camera but replace it with a more powerful one. Im going to buy a Charango to help me recover from Horse drawn balls. One last piece of information, I´m well on my way to fooling to animal kingdon that I am, myself, an Alpaca - gloves, hat, socks and much more tomorrow.

After all his waffle do you see why I write the blog?