From Salta to Bolivia
Hi everyone,
The internet connexion is really bad here so I won´t be able to put any photographs in this article. Sorry about that! I´ll try again later.
I just wanted to let you know that on the 6th of December we arrived in Salta at 10:00 p.m. We found a very nice hostel-to-be (Pato, the owner, doesn´t have the official title of "hostel" yet but it´s only a matter of time as he surely fulfills the requirements). Great place, finely decorated. Pato is very nice and helpful and he has loads of information on the tours. I was a bit scared when I discovered that he was the happy owner of a pittbull (as you guessed I don´t like those dogs) but it´s only a few months old and I have to admit that even pittbull puppies are cute if you keep away from their growing teeth. Although the house is a bit far from the center we quickly decided to stay there as were knackered because of the long ride on the bus.
On the following day, December 7th, we visited the center of Salta. Carole and I were expecting a town about the size of Mendoza but it´s actually a fairly big city. We wandered in the streets looking for souvenirs (I wanted to buy maté as Salta was our last stop in Argentina) and admiring the gorgeous monuments. We got on a teleferic climbing the Cerro San Bernardo. The view is stunning from there. Then we took the stairs to go back to the city center, more than 1000 steps! That´s what I call sport! At about 9:00 in the evening we got tired of walking and we decided to get some food. Food is good! Except that Carole had spotted the Grido shop in the morning and she was dying for an ice-cream. Of course, we got lost, impossible to find this damn Grido shop. The original plan was to have an ice-cream as a desert but when we eventually found the place, we were too tired to eat a decent meal. So we just got the ice-cream and went straight back to the hostel. Typical backpacker´s balanced diet...We had bought tickets for an excursion around Salta for the following day and therefore we wanted to go to bed early. Back in the hostel we met a French guy who´d been travelling in South America for a few months and we spent some time chatting with him. He had been almost everywhere and he gave us good advice for the last two months of our trip.
The excursion started at 07:00 in the morning on the 8th of December. Once again, there were only French people in the mini-bus! It´s weird to see so many French in South America, I think I´ll never get used to it. We followed the road of the "tren a las nubes"(literally train to the clouds) which is no longer running, so we did it in a mini-bus! The tour included different sights: colorful mountains, the local fauna (vicuñas, a few rodents), ruins from previous civilisations and typical small villages. The guide also stopped in the Salinas Grandes, a desert of salt where we saw the local exploiting the salar and making statues of salt. The mini-bus dropped us at the station at 08:00 p.m.as we had to hop on an another bus to La Quiaca at 10:00 p.m. Big day.
As usual, we couldn´t sleep on the bus. At least we watched a good film: "The Green Mile" which kept us awake until 2:00 a.m. The bus reached La Quiaca at 05:00 a.m this morning (this explains why this article has no style and is poorly written, I´m literally falling asleep on the keyboard! ). We managed to cross the Bolivian border at 06:00 and then we queued one and a half hour to get a train ticket to Uyuni. We´re leaving at 03:30 p.m today and we´ll arrive tonight at 00:00. Uyuni is famous for the "Salar de Uyuni" which is the biggest salar in the world. That´s our first step in Bolivia. There won´t be too many of them as we have to be in Lima by the 5th of January to take our flight to Cancún and we still have to see La Paz, Titicaca Lake and the Machu Picchu. I hope we´ll make it! I´ll see you later with some pictures. Good luck!