Salta La Linda

Can you believe I have been here for 2 months already! Only 2 months to go! I'm going to be sad to leave.

I just got back from spending a week in the north of the country. I stayed with Marta's daughter-in-laws' family. Of course, like the rest of the people I have met, they were really nice and treated me well. They have a 22 year old daughter named Laura who helped me out alot. I stayed in the little house that they have on their property separated from the main house with her. It is so beautiful there, and the house is up on a hill so you can see the rest of the city from above!

Laura works for a tourist company as a translator for Italians, so I bought excursions through them. The first thing I did was went on a city tour of Salta, then I went to the Museum of Archeology where they have the 3 mummies found frozen in one of the mountains from the Inca period. I only got to see one of them, because the other 2 have to be kept in really cold temperature. It's pretty neat, their bodies are completely preserved, organs and skin and everything. I also went with Laura that night to see the orquestra of Salta play, her boyfriend places the contrabass, soloist. It was nice, because I had been wanting to go to something like that, the only thing is I had a headache by that time because I was looking around the museum beforehand.

The next day Laura had to translate on a tour, and I went on the same tour with her. We went through the Quebrada de Humuahaca, we stopped in a little town of Purmamarca, and also Tilcara and then Humuahaca. The route there was so beautiful, the mountains are all around you and they are of different colors, for example the cerro de los 7 colores.

On Friday I went on a tour without Laura, to Cachi. I think I loved the landscapes that we went through on this day the most. At first the mountains were lush and green, and then it changed to desert and we reach this area that is the Parque Nacional de los Cadrones, which means the Park of the Cacti. They were so cool! I don't know why, but I really liked them. So we got to walk around there some. We stopped in a little town to eat lunch, and it was really pretty and outside. And then finally we reached Cachi, which is a town in the mountains that has some colonial buildings still. Only people of indigenious ancestry live in all of these places that I visited.

That night we went to a Pena, and I loved it! It's where people go to a restaurant and play folkoric music. It was so fun, and the people that played and sang were so good. Laura and I went with an Italian girl named Valeria that we had met on the excursions, she is living in Buenos Aires too.


Saturday we went to the Salinas Grandes, which is where the ground is covered in salt from when an ocean used the be there. The way there was of course surrounded by mountains and different vegetation. We drove the same route that the Tren de los Nubes goes, but the train is closed right now, so it's nice that I still got to go the same route. We stopped in a little town to eat lunch too. And we saw llamas! I love them, they are so cute, and now I can say that I've actually seen them!

All the places that I went were very pretty, but I spent most of the time in the van, we drove so much. I covered alot of ground, first on a 20 hour bus ride there, and then on these all day excursions around Salta and Jujuy. It was beautiful (but pretty cold, brrr) and I really liked the Basombrios, they were great and it was nice hanging out with Laura, someone my age and really interesting. Now, I have to go back to school work! You can look at more pictures by clicking on the title of this post.