Salta and Cafayate

Took us a while to update you again, so we'll start by apologising for that!

We left you exiting Asuncion and heading on an epic 15 hour bus trip across Argentina to Salta. The bus journey itself was not without incident with numerous drug searches by armed police (routine in Arg) and a road blocked by fire as a protest! However, other than taking longer than expected our first long/night bus trip was fine, the seats even reclined to almost horizontal for sleeping!

Once in Salta we stayed in Hostel Salta Por Siempre. We had been recommended it and it was excellent. Really nice rooms and very helpful staff. We also bumped into a French girl called Charlotte we briefly met in Iguazu.

Salta is a very pretty place with a really nice central square. There's some fantastic museums, the best were MAAM and Pajcha for us. The MAAM has 3 perfectly mummified Inca child sacrifices on display which were weird, but incredibly interesting! Pajcha had the most enthusiastic curator called Diego who gave us a personal tour.

Other than that we had our first asado (traditional Arg bbq), at the hostel, which we washed down with 3 quid a litre gin! We also went horseback riding with gaucho's. This was amazing as neither of us had ridden before and the gaucho's were really helpful and great fun. The asado and free wine (and sore thighs!) meant Tasha went back out after lunch and I spent the afternoon drinking more free wine with the owner, Enrique, regaling a few of us with his tales. He has 4 women half his age on the go and only drinks coffee, red wine or whiskey apparently!

We really enjoyed Salta but were craving a "middle of nowhere" experience and headed for the more rural Cafayate.

After an amazing 4 hour bus journey winding through valleys we got to Cafayate. Set within a beautiful valley surrounded by mountains, it is the leading producer of Torrontes a white wine made only in Arg. We had taken a chance on a hostel out of town for some peace and tranquility. The hostel was probably a bit too far out for some, but the scenery and views were spectacular. It was called Paris Texas and was being run by an American, Jon and his partner Linsey. They also ran a school in town and were brilliant hosts throughout our stay. Unfortunately whilst there we missed out on wine as we wasn't too well, but we did 2 brilliant treks. One was out to the Quebrada valley to see the amazing coloured rock formations and 2 huge naturally formed caves. The views were incredible and we ventured quite far which was good. The second trek was to some waterfalls around 7km from town. Once there we picked up a local guide and got going. There were 7 falls in total, increasing in size as we went. This was again a brilliant sight and apart from a moment when my mild vertigo played up it was a tiring but great day.

After a really nice time relaxing away from the cities we were finally feeling back on form and decided to make the journey south to Mendoza for our last stop in Argentina before heading to Chile.