travel bugs

These past two weekends have been full of sporadic traveling. I have discovered the world of buses in Argentina and beyond. I suppose since flying is over budget for the majority of people here the next best option is to bus it. I was expecting something in the realm of Greyhound, but it is very different. This, for example, is a typical travel bus, followed by the enormous and airport-like bus terminal:

There are a million bus companies to choose from that go to all corners of the country and to Brazil, Chile and even as far as Peru. They also offer amenities such as a "cama" or "semi-cama," seats that recline180 or 160 degrees. This came in handy during my 18 hour bus ride to Salta two weekends ago.

Salta

Day 1: Salta
Salta is the name of a city but also of the province its located in in the north of Argentina. I left Thursday evening to arrive in Salta Friday afternoon. I was meeting my friend Tara, who I originally met at World Camp in Malawi. She is studying in Cordoba for the semester, thus we have since conquered 3 continents together including the U.S. Salta is the 8th largest city in the country but nothing in comparison to the size of Buenos Aires. We walked around the city the first day, which basically had a couple of nice churches and a cute town center like most cities in South America; otherwise fairly boring. Tara and I went in search of places to rent a car, only to find that automatic transmission cars were nonexistent.

Later that night we went to a peña, a type of restaurant with traditional food and with musicians who play folkloria, or traditional music. The restaurant was really crowded but a group of 4 singers invited us to join them for dinner. It turned out to be very charming and of course their music was beautiful to listen to. They also gave us coca leaves to chew...possible bad decision? Most likely no since it was just the leaf. They pointed to a t-shirt hung up on the wall with a picture of a leaf that said "La hoja de coca no es una droga!" "Coca leaf is not a drug!"



Day 2: Purmamarca/Salinas Grandes

One of the main sights we wanted to see were the giant salt flats to the northwest of Salta. To get there we got to the bus station at 7 in the morning to take a 4 hour ride to a little town called Pumamarca. The ride was kind of brutal since it was a curvy road at high altitude. But the view was amazing. The environment around Salta was very dry and reminded me of what Texas would look like, with lots of cacti and huge canyons.

wild cacti

wild llama

the long and winding road

We got to Pumamarca which was a very small, quaint, but touristy town. The only way to get to the Salinas from there was to pay someone local to drive. So that's what we did...it took another hour and a half of driving up a mountain to get there. The highest point we hit was 4,170 meters (2.6 miles). And excitingly enough I saw my first wild llamas! Little did I know I would be eating llama meat in an empanda later that night for dinner...

The salt flat was really cool. It was huge. A little dirtier than I expected, and also with a lot of space reserved for salt harvesting. We took some fun pictures.

salt mining

tara and me

Day 3: Cafayate
We kind of went to Cafayate on a limb, not knowing much about it. But it turned out to be the best day of the whole trip. Cafayate is well known for its vineyards and oftentimes overlooked by Mendoza. The town was adorable. We ate lunch outside since it was a nice day and decided to rent bicycles. Crazily enough Tara invited the guy working at the tour agency to come along with us for free. We biked up a small hill to get a better view of the mountains. Very scenic. Then we biked to the one vineyard that was open Sunday to find that a tour of old Argentines had just arrived. We skipped out on the tour of the winery to take pictures but of course returned for the wine tasting. Considering we had no official plans in Salta and no idea what was around it, the trip turned out wonderfully.

downtown Cafayate

the ultimate tourist picture: llama, cactus, vineyard, welcome sign

views from the bus (canyons and cloudforest)

Day 4: Back to Salta
Since there wasn't time to do much on the last day since I had to catch my bus home, in the morning I took a cable car up a mountain to see a panoramic view of Salta. Very beautiful. All in all this trip made me excited to explore the enormous country of Argentina because it has so much natural beauty to offer.There are still some places close to Salta we didn't have time to visit, like a famous canyon that is a UNESCO site and a tourisy train that rides into the clouds...I surprisingly would like to go back.

Montevideo

My main motivation for visiting: passport stamp. Before going, I knew two things. One that Montevideo is the capital of Uruguay and is easy to visit from BsAs. Also that Montevideo was supposed to be boring. Nothing to do.

To get there, my friend Lauren and I bought a ferry ticket through a company called Buquebus which was a totally new concept for me. It is like an airport without all the crap - since they have to handle migration and customs they are kind of serious but not enough to matter. So anyway, we took a 1 hour ferry ride to Colonia Uruguay and then hopped on a bus at the same station for 2 1/2 hours to Montevideo.

Disaster #1: For some reason, when the bus got to Montevideo it wasn't exactly at a "Buquebus" station. We weren't sure where/what it was. Somewhere really dark and without taxis. Luckily we had been talking to a lady from BsAs on the bus who was visiting Montevideo. Her friend was wherever we were to pick her up, and she offered us a ride to our hostel. Very nice gesture, very bad idea to agree. At the moment we had no Uruguayan pesos to take a cab. Luckily we got to the hostel in one piece, but again potential disaster and decisions that went against all common-sense.

By the time we got to the hostel it was past midnight, so Lauren and I decided to call it an early night and get up early to explore. So the next morning we grabbed a map and ventured to the coastline to walk around. There's a part of the city called "Ciudad Vieja", old city, so we went there but really there was to nothing to see. So we decided to head back to the central part of town and find a place to eat lunch.

Disaster #2: Lauren and I are cautious about our things. We were following all the rules. Walking together (as opposed to being alone), out in broad daylight, EVEN talking in Spanish. Seriously. The problem was, this weekend happened to be some kind of vacation or holiday for the students, not really sure, and the city was completely deserted. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I see Lauren playing tug-of-war with her purse with a little kid probably no more than 12 years old. A strap on her bag broke and the boy starts running. This all happened so quickly...the first thing I thought was that basically Lauren's life was in that bag: passport, visa (which we had spent 8 hours getting the day before), cell phone, camera, yellow fever card, ticket home, etc. So my first impulse was to start running after the kid. I ran for about 4 blocks with Lauren behind me and just started yelling. Up ahead I saw people and cars started pulling over, and all of a sudden the boy just dropped her purse in the middle of road. On purpose, who knows.

Then a turn of events went rather well. A guy who looked about our age, maybe a little older, picked up the bag and handed it to us. Lauren checked and luckily had everything in there that was important. What luck eh? Anyway this guy, whose name was Juan Francisco and very charming, was on the way to visit his grandma because he had just gotten back from a trip to Europe and he invited us to come up since we were a little shaky. Another encounter with a stranger, but we agreed. His grandma was the sweetest little lady and gave us coke with a little bit of whisky to calm our nerves and a very fancy lunch. We were there for probably 3 hours talking.

Then we ventured back to the central part of the city and in the direction of the hostel. The problem was, there was really nothing to do. Earlier in the day we had discovered the Uruguay was basically a continuation of Argentina, in that practically everything is the same. This meant that people don't eat dinner until 10. We had about 3 hours to kill. We came across a historical theater that was one of the many boring points of interest on our map. It was filled with people but we decided to ask if we could go inside to look around. The funny thing was I was wearing jeans and chuck taylors. Too bad a left my fur coat at home :), the attire of many of the well dressed old ladies here. Turns out, it was the opening night of Madame Butterfly. I have never seen an opera in my life and do not know much about opera, but I had heard of Madame Buttefly. So we said, hey why not? Our tickets were $10.

Here we were, in Uruguay, watching a story about an American who travels to Japan, that was converted to an opera in Italian, that was being translated into Spanish with subtitles projected above the stage, which I was then retranslating into my head in English. Crazy but worth it.

So that was Montevideo in a nutshell. Keep in mind that Montevideo it is the safest big city in South America, and Uruguay is the richest country in South America. Hmm.

Disaster #3: Oh and I can't forget, there was a teeny slip of paper attached to our ticket that we got stamped on the way into Uruguay that we were supposed to have to get out. But no one told us this. Uruguay migration is pretty easy to persuade.

One note: Uruguayans love their mate.

Every third person was carrying a huge thermos under their armpit with their mate gourd in the same hand. This I don't understand. The two things are so impractical for on-the-go. Mate is a such a big deal there that THIS was on the bus:

Mr. Client:

For your security on the omnibus

DRINKING MATE IS PROHIBITED

The straw is able to produce wounds in the mouth

Hot water can burn you or another passenger

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