Salta

me on baherito "little bird"
Gaucho cowboy....and some impressive sunburn
me and girls i stayed with in the cable car
gorgeous mountains
pretty buildings too!

The argentinian side of the border town, La Quiaca, is very different to Villazon, the bolivian side. Suddenly there are pastry shops, proper roads and little cafes!

I caught the next bus to Salta, a city in the north of Argentina, and a mere 7 hours away, with some girls who I had met on the train and crossed the border with. We arrived in Salta Wednesday evening and found a really nice hostel to stay in. The next few days were spent wandering around Salta, shopping, eating and drinking. It was perfect!

Salta is a lovely city, and felt really friendly and safe... especially after Bolivia! Argentina is supposed to be quite Italian; I don´t know about that having never been to Italy, but it certainly was quite continental and european. You can even get croissants! The buildings and plazas are really colonial in style, but well maintained, whereas in Bolivia, everything is falling down.

The landscape was also a lot greener, with more trees, I suppose because it is not as high up. I have been really missing proper green trees, so I was very happy to get a bit of a tree fix! There are huge cactii everywhere and the mountains are incredible too.

We went in a cable car over the city one day, and horse riding by the mountains the next. The horse riding was really really good, although painful afterwards!! We went to a gaucho ranch(gauchos are argentinian cowboys) and the ranch was beautiful. The gauchos also wore the traditional outfits and did things like playing flute-like instruments while they rode; they made it look so easy! We rode round the tobacco plantations and the areas where they dry it all out. I´m afraid that the horse riding itself was a bit of a battle; I could manage to trot, but galloping felt like I was back on Death Road again! However it was a lovely day, although I did end up with some impressive sunburn and a very sore bum by the end of it!

Argentina is, of course, well known for its meat, and it´s wine. After Bolivia, which is not only unremarkable, but I would go as far as to say appalling, in these respects, it was lovely to be in Argentina! I didn´t have to worry about what the food/unhygenic plates etc would do to my stomach! The red wine was gorgeous, and the meat was too, even though i´m not a huge meat fan myself, so it had to be good for me to love it. The only thing is though, if you order a steak, you get a huge steak....and nothing else! They love the meat so much, that they don´t even bother with vegetables or chips or anything!

I left Salta to start heading back on Monday morning. It was probably a good job that I had to go, as I kept buying clothes...I was so excited to see real clothes shops and clothes that were actually of a style within the last decade that I kept buying them! I was sad to leave Salta though. I am definitely going back there, and to see the rest of Argentina too, at some point. Its a very really beautiful and relaxed country, and it was a good little holiday too!

Anyway, I am back in La Paz now. I have just got back from lessons at school, which are going well, especially after my little break. Unfortunately I have a nasty cold, but I am off to the pub now to get some hot whisky for medicinal purposes.

Uyuni Salt Lakes and up to the border

Cactii growing on the coral islands
ahem, yes. Pringles.
The building, the tables, even the chairs are made from salt

Standing on a salt mound
The sunset was stunning

I was due to set off for Argentina on Friday. However, a goodbye indian meal on Thursday night rudely awakened me on its way back up at 5am, and then its effects left me unable to get any further than the bathroom for the rest of the day, let alone out of the country. So on Saturday morning, still slightly ill, I was up early, ready to try again. Of course, I had forgotten that that day was La Paz's biggest festival, "Gran Poder", which starts at dawn and lasts through the day until 3am. The parade route effectively cuts the city in half and no one can get across the road, although you can queue at a couple of points and they let people through every hour or so. The queue are literally hours long. The costumes are spectacular and were 30,000 dancers in the parade. The dance, called 'Morenada', goes two steps forward and then one back. As you can imagine, for 30,000 people, this takes quite a while. Unfortunately I was on one side of the road....and the bus terminal on the other. There were no buses leaving the city until late in the day, anyway as all the roads were closed. I left the house at 10am, managed to cross the road at 7pm and finally managed to leave the city on a bus at 8.30pm. Nightmare.

I arrived in a town called Oruro, where the train line starts, at 1am, found a hostel and slept soundly. Once again rising, bright and early to catch the train, found that due to it being a Sunday, the train does not go until 7pm. There is, of course, only one train a day. The joys of travelling in Bolivia. Anyway, Oruro was an immensely boring town...luckily I had brought the fattest book I could find with me!

That night I took the train from Oruro to the Uyuni Salt Flats, arriving at 2am. The trains, I am glad to report, are very comfortable and spacious, obviously made for long journeys. Actually the shortest train journey possible in Bolivia is about 5hours. They even run on time!!

I spent Monday in the town of Uyuni, which was the first time i actually felt on holiday. It was a lovely town, small but not too small, and quiet, but not too quiet. For some reason, in a country which has really not embraced the pizza as other countries have, the only food places were pizzerias. Possibly as it is one of the few foods for tourists that even Bolivians can manage to cook properly.

On Tuesday I went on a tour of the salt flats, which were incredible. 40,000 years ago there was a huge salt lake there in the Andes, but now all that remains is the salt, which is 5metres thick. It is solid at this time of year, but at the beginning of the year is mushy. It covers an area which is 12,000 sq km, so it is literally nothing but salt as far as the eye can see in every direction. There are mounds of salt everywhere, where it has been scooped into piles, ready to be carried away by trucks to be used for food and such. It is a very strange and surreal place to be. There are strange salt stuctures, shaped by the weather, and flamingos live in the south. There are hot water geysers in some places (possibly something to do with the nearby volcano? I couldn't understand his explanation of the geysers in spanish!), a hotel made from salt, even the beds and table and chairs, and leftover coral reefs 'islands', stranded in the middle of the salt lakes, which have cactii growing on them and by climbing up to the top of them, offer an amazing view of, well, a lot of salt, and a lot of mountains!

It is such surreal scenery. In some places, the salt is literally like soft, dry sand on a beach, and in other places hard as rock. It reflects the sun at least as much as snow and I realised how much I needed sunglasses! Its also a perfect place for optical illusions as its just a huge expanse of nothingness. The mountains even looked like they were floating in the air, as the salt reflected them back underneath, as water does. It was a very weird place. One the sun began to go down, the slat went pink and purple reflecting the sunset and watching the sunset on the horizon was possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. There was nothing, in any direction, other than salt, mountains and the sun, all of which went strange colours.

I left Uyuni on the train again at 10pm that night and headed to the border town of Villazon, which we reached at 7am. I met some girls on the train also heading to Salta, Argentina, and we all went together to the border. The border was absolutely horrendous. There was a queue for everyone crossing the border to Argentina.... and one window where they checked your papers, one at a time! I should also note that there was absolutely no-one entering Bolivia! We had to wait an hour and a half to get across the border, and then got straight on a bus to Salta, as La Quiaca (which is basically the same town as Villazon, just the argentinian side) seemed pretty dire.

So I am in Salta now. I have been a few days but that is enough of what I've been up to for now! I will write about what Salta is like soon....it will suffice to say that I really don't want to leave!