Siesta in Salta

The internet centre in BA´s Aeroparque airport feels like home (6 hours to kill between the Northwest of Argie and Patagonia) so it leaves me time to tell you a story of a slow-turning ceiling fan, 3 rocky towns, a 3400m pass with the sweetest mountain air and CrapCar, a valiant chariot that linked them all.

About Salta I don´t know a lot - spent two days in bed, alternately swimming in sweat and shivering under 2 blankets, with a chest infection that left me weak and without appetite, and turned Coups into a nurse unrivalled by Mother Theresa.(Returning every few hours with an interesting story, or a photograph and always a little present to tempt me back to life. The hat, yoghurt and nuts were great hits, but somehow the combination of whirring fan, intense heat and wet sheets nauseatingly turned the wonderfulness that is dulce de leche (caramelly milk "paste" and totally divine) into something I will never be able to eat again.)

Then we hired CrapCar (clearly having been in an accident recently, the bonnet unspray-painted; cellotape stretched across the roof seemingly holding the new windscreen in place; spare tyre balder than a man with no hair on his head; semen stains on the back seat. You name it.)

But in the end, CrapCar did the job most admirably (I was still feeling weak so Amanda drove the first stretch), taking us (along a paved road) through a lunar-mad rocky/mountainous area to dusty Cafayate where Coups bought a lovely leather orb necklace for 12 pesos (at US$4 a possible import opportunity?). As with all Argentinian towns, the square came alive at 10pm as a blaring disco car vied for airspace with a local band, weary donkeys monotonously carried their youthful cargo around and around, and restaurants disgorged one empañada (essentially, mini Cornish pasties) after the other into expectant tourist and local gullets. (Refreshingly, most tourists here are Argentinians, with very few Europeans.)

Then CrapCar, with some gentle coaxing from myself, crawled along the rubber-hungry dirt road to sleepy Los Molinos, where it´s chased by dogs just because they hadn´t had anything else to do for two days. We stayed in a hospadeje filled with the godly memories of its previous owners, two Carmelite nuns and paid only 30 pesos. And didn´t stay in the luxurious finca of a Buenos Aires dama who, with steely good breeding- and maybe a tinge of sadness? - rules her very empty (and too expensive for us) escape for rich Porteños. I hope our meal in her dining room made up for the disappointment of rejection.

At less than 30km/h on the badly maintained Ruta 40, CrapCar makes it to fresh Cachi, a little town clinging to Nevada de Cachi (a peak over 6km up in the air). And the next morning we have breakfast (a pear and crackers) at over 3,4,00m on a mountain pass where travellers pay hommage to their kin killed on the road. And we both realise that nothing is sweeter than the smell of thinnish mountain air and nothing more soothing than the sweep of green mountain folds and crags as they point the way to the flatlands below. (Maybe a barn near Briancon, we egg each other on?)

And here we are now - at the airport, looking forward to the cooler, Atlantic air that we hope to find in Patagonia.

Life goes on, most people are at work and we, for the record, are having a most excellent time.

PS: Just realised that I, in the vein of a North American tourist, managed to wipe out two days: Iguacu Falls. And touristy it was, blimey. But also how beautiful, how impressive these falls that go on and on, surrounded by the deepest green greenery imaginable.

We´ll try to upload some more photographs at our next go. And thanks for all your messages: I get very excited every time I turn on the computer.