One small step for mankind...
...one giant leap for me !
I left you on the 1st of December in Mendoza as we were about to hop on our bus to La Rioja. Before going any further I would like to tell Papou regarding his comment on the nice birds mentioned in our previous article in french, that his daughter is taking all the pictures and she wouldn´t let me take any of them birds! I promise I´ll do my best for the next article...
Where was I? Oh, yes La Rioja. The bus was slightly delayed due to a breakdown in the middle of the night but we managed to arrive early (8:00 a.m). It was so hot in La Rioja that I felt like I would suffocate. We would see later that day that the temperature reached 42 degrees. Carole was reading the Lonely Planet and she suddenly jumped saying : "Oh sh*t! We can´t go to the Valle de la Luna from here, we gotta go to San Angustin de valle fertil. That was 4 hours before La Rioja." Good start. Then we were told that there were only 3 buses a week to San Angustin and the next one was leaving the same day at 12:00. 8 hours on a bus for nothing, and we wouldn´t even have time to visit La Rioja. I found a locker in the bus station where we left our backpacks and we headed towards the town center looking for the Tourist office. Again we were very lucky: the office had moved! We had been wandering in the streets of La Rioja for a good 45 mins when we eventually found the place. The guy told us that there were agencies doing tours to Valle de la Luna from La Rioja. Great ! No need to take the bus again. Next step: finding a hostel.
For the first time in our trip, we only had our day packs with us so we could see various hostels and choose the best one. We ended up in a private house, colonial style, clean, quite far from the town center but very cheap. The owner has a talking parrot which bites quite hard and insults you. Very funny! We spent the rest of the day visiting the town. The center is quite small but very pleasant thanks to the trees that provide shade. There´s a gorgeous cathedral and we enjoyed a free gig in the evening on the main place. Carole also managed to jump on two Italian girls so that they would come with us to the Valle de la Luna the following day. Bearing in mind that the more the cheapest! The agency organises a trip to the Valle de la Luna and Talampaya the two main national parks in the province, the same day.
So there we were, yesterday, up at 06:00 and riding a 4x4 with the guide and the two Italian girls. 
The guide was giving us some explanation on the culture, the landscape, flora and fauna. I noticed that the river beds were actually dry and he told us that it was hardly raining in that province and the rivers were running only a few hours a year. Amazing! Our first stop was in Talampaya. There we could see petroglyphs (pictures carved in the rock by the natives), a canyon and condors. We played with the echo shouting "gooooooal" together. The site is beautiful and very impressive with the massive red rocks strangely shaped by the wind and erosion.
The second stop was in Ischigualasto park named "Valle de la luna" (the Moon Valley) by a local poet for its similarity to the landscape on the moon. There´s a museum on the site, where they show a few squeletons of Dinosaurs found on the site. They also explain 
how they excave and clean fossils. Then we visited the huge park in 4x4 and discovered the Triassic period (before the dinosaurs) a very dry landscape, with only rocks of different colors. The different layers are clearly sperated: the yellow rocks are the oldest sediments, then comes the white ones and the red ones on top. It´s so strange to see this barren land that it really feels like it´s the surface of the moon. A unique experience.
Today, we´re taking the bus to San Miguel de Tucumán. There isn´t much to see there but that´s the closets place to take a bus to Cafayate. I´ll tell you about Cafayate later...
Bye now !