Salta

Red Rocks on the Road to Cafayate

Argentina has been an absolute highlight of our trip so far, and Salta was a real highlight of Argentina. We spent a busy and wonderful five days here in the northwest of the country, close to the borders with Bolivia and Chile. During that time we did two excellent days trips outside of the city (in the wider Salta province and a bit of Jujuy), spent one day in the city itself and spent two fantastic days on a local ranch doing some horse riding and a lot of eating and drinking.

Fun on the Salt Flats

Salta is a lovely city just to hang around for a day or two. Its small and compact with some really ornate churches that we took lots of snaps of. We did both our day trips with ‘A Las Nubes’ tour company, opting to pay a little extra to go in a car/jeep with only a couple of others instead of a bus tour with twenty people. This really paid off as it meant we were able to stop whenever we wanted and we had more interesting chats with the guides (Carina & Juanjho) than might have been otherwise possible. The two days cost us 320 pesos each, about €35 each per tour.

Punamarca Street Cacti

Seven-Color Rocks, Punamarca Typical Landscape, Northern Argentina

High Andean Road Salt Extraction Pools

The first was to Cafayate, a wine-producing town south of Salta, where we visited two wineries for tours and tastings. I really enjoyed this bit as I had never been on a winery tour before and had it in my head that I wanted to do one before this trip is finished. For the second day trip we did a loop northwest of the city which follows some of the route taken by the famous ‘train to the clouds’ (which we considered doing until we heard about the $140 tickets). The trip covered 500km while visiting Punamarca and the seven colour rock, Las Salinas salt flat, the old copper town of San Antonio de los Cobres, and the Inca ruins at Santa Rosa de Tastil. Again, the whole trip was fantastic (Juanjho took some cool photos of us on the salt flat), but like the first day, the scenery was the main attraction. The landscapes in and around Salta boasted the most amazing and impressive scenery I have ever seen. Describing scenery is not my strong point so I’ll let the photos do the talking -hopefully they’ll give you some idea of why we were so affected and awed by Salta.

Salta Church Canyon on the Road to Cafayate Salt Flats

Eddie and Pal Wine Cellar, Cafayate

Riona Little

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3 Responses to “Salta”

  1. Maria Says:

    These photos are amazing!!!

  2. Rachel McC Says:

    Hey there sounds like you both are having an amazing time, Eddie don’t worry about the horse, maybe you got a deaf one. Ri it was great to talk to you at Paula’s birthday, fair play to you ringing. Looking forward to seeing you and hearing all your stories , but you’ll have loads of adventures left before we get to that. The pictures of the Salar are class we tried to take some but failed miserably… love the blog by the way x x

  3. eddie Says:

    I don´t think he was deaf, but he´s probably dumb now because I think I might have rearranged his mouth for him I was pulling the reins so hard! Looking forward to Lorraine and Martins wedding to catch up with everyone, be good!
    Eddie x

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