Salta

I travelled to Salta on the full cama bus from Buenos Aires. This meant as well as a fully reclining chair I got my tea on the bus and a nice lunch in place by the road. The journey took about 20 hours and was very smooth. I was only goingto Salta because it was en route to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. I planned to stay maybe one or two nights depending when I could get the bus. Much to my dismay I found the next bus was 3 days later, and full, so I would have to spend 5 nights in Salta. I found a pretty mediocre (at best) hostel and spent the evening wandering around town feeling pretty sick and alone, but I did spoil myself and have the biggest steak I have seen in my life. Next day I was feeling pretty rough, too many nights on buses and late nights in BA probably took their toll. To see all the sights in Salta would take less than a day, and I certainly wasn't feeling up to any of the expensive adventure sports you could do nearby, or doing any of the expensive local tours which would involve most of the day on a bus again, so I resolved to take it fairly easy, get this blog up to date, do some reading and so on.

On the first day I went up the cable car to the mountain overlooking the town, did some internet, and sat in a cafe on the square drinking tea and reading the crappy books that were the only English ones available in the hostel bookswap. Had another nice huge dinner on my own on the second night, but was still sick and lonely and I hardly slept that night due to illness, noise and whatever else. The next morning I'd kind of resolved to check out and go somewhere else a bit more expensive and try to get a single room, but I checked out a few places and they were too expensive or full, so I gave up. Just more tea, books and internet for the rest of the day, but then I met a couple of nice young English guys in my dorm and time became much easier to pass! That night we went out for dinner along with a French guy, and went on and had a few drinks afterwards. Next day we decided to see the new Batman Movie, and after had lunch, internetted, and checked out some local museums first.

The first was about local high altitude archeology, and the discovery of three mummified children on top of a nearby volcano. One of the mummies was on display, which was good to see, but other than that I felt most of the displays didn't tell me what I wanted to know. There was also a small art museum, which grew on me a bit, but had nothing spectacular. Batman however was extremely spectacular! Afterwards we had dinner in a place with a gaucho dance show and then a band (not that we knew when we went in and got stuck in the front row seats) where I again ate obscene amounts of grilled meats. Afterwards we went back to the hostel and had a couple of beers and played some cards. On the last day in town there wasn't much left to do, so I followed the pattern of earlier days. Lunch was local 'Lorco', which contained slightly to many intestines for my liking, and dinner was a huge pile of empanadas before a few beers back at the hostel with another French guy. In the end Salta really grew on me as a town, it had some very nice buildings, squares, restaurants and bars, and spending the time there wasn't as hard as I feared it might be. My 7am bus to San Pedro involved a pre 6am rise as it was a bit of walk.