March 7-9, 2016

Following the magnificent Iguazu falls I headed to Salta to see the painted mountains. Salta is in the northwest region of Argentina and along with Jujuy has some of the most interesting mountainous landscape I’ve seen.

In Salta, I decided to try Airbnb for the first time on this trip.  It was a wonderful experience, no sharing bathrooms, no dorms or bunk beds and I had a kitchen!  I was so excited, I was going to cook black beans and rice because I miss me some Willy’s burritos.  Sadly I could not find any black beans in Salta (who doesn’t have black beans, I mean come on!).  So I settled for channa instead.  We’ll come back to this later.

So the downside of an airbnb is that you have to book your own tours.  So I went to the city center in search of some and found a couple of really good ones.  The first tour took me to the Jujuy Province which is just north of Salta.  Wikipedia describes it as “a province in Argentina’s remote northwest, defined by the dramatic rock formations and hills of the Quebrada de Humahuaca.”  It’s a pretty accurate description.

This area contains Purmamarca, which has the seven colored mountain.  The colors come from mineral deposits…sulfur, iron, and other mineraly stuff.  Same goes for the rest of the region…the green is copper deposits.  We also visited an archeological site at Tilcara and then ended in the tiny city of Humahuaca…yeah say that three times fast.  Driving through the area was amazing.  I took about a million pictures.  Some are included below.

I also met these fools on the trip.

We all ended up going to dinner that night and talked about how ignorant Americans are, present company included (there were two of us in the group).  Someone asked us who the current Prime Minister of UK is…I guessed Tony Blair haha.  Oh well, I blame the system. The other American is as foolish as me and is also traveling the world (kidding, she’s much better prepared than me).  I met up with her in Cordoba as well.  Hopefully, we’ll cross paths again in our travels.

The next day, I took another tour to the Cafayate region.  This is the wine growing region in Salta.  The ride there was also amazing.  It was very quiet and sleepy.  Reminded me a bit of California but drier and with bigger more colorful mountains.  The wine we tried was adequate but not as awesome as California wine.  The ice cream was amazing though. Dulce de leche with chocolate chips…yum!  Pictures of Cafayate and journey to Cafayate below.

I was supposed to meet up with the folks above again during the evening but decided I should probably cook the garbanzo beans that I bought since it was my last night there.  So I made channa with makeshift ingredients.  It actually came out pretty good, but not spicy at all.  Still it was a taste of home.  I will not give up my search for black beans though.