Salta

They have a gondola up to the top of one of the hills in Salta, so we went to the top of that.

You're way above the ground the whole way up; a little scary.
At the top they have just a massive artificial waterfall system. Ridiculous, but cool.

We walked back down.

They have some humungous spiders and spiderwebs over the trail for the top part of the trail.



There's a big and nice park in the middle of Salta. Our hostel was right by it so it was pretty convenient.

There's a constant little market in the park selling lots of tourist crap, but also some really good food.

12 Empanadas for $1.50 is pretty much impossible to beat. It is right up there with 5 for $1 Mexican street tacos.

Our hostel was just awesome. If you're in Salta, stay at the Inti Huasi. It is really nice, cheap, and on Wednesday and Fridays, they have this ridiculous parilla dinner for $8. It comes with all the awesome Argentine steak you want and all the wine you can drink, and it lasts for about 3 hours. Probably the most impressive part is the truly high quality vegetarian creations that the house chef makes. This was definitely one of the best meals we had the whole time in South America. We ended up having it twice.


Our first time, the owner/manager guy (seen in the picture above) just kept forcing the wine on us. We had plenty, then when he got tired of pushing steak on us, he went back to the wine. I had a big water glass, and I thought it was cool that he kept re-filling it. But after a while, I was done with wine. Then when I turned around, he would fill it back up. He tried that on everyone. Then about 11pm, he said, "Ok, we're all going out to a club! OK, we go in 10 minutes; I know the owner, I can get us all in." Um, ok. So we hop in a few cabs and are pretty suspect about this, but what the hell, we've had liters of wine. We get to this area of Salta with clubs all over this street and lines snaking out of all the clubs. Our guy runs inside and after a few minutes, I figure this isn't going to work but, whatever. Then, our guy runs outside and yells for him to follow him and we all not only get in free, but get to cut in front of the huge line. Pretty cool, and pretty fun.


Again, Salta is a really nice place to hang out.



The next day we headed back south a few hours to Cafayate (pronounced Caf a Jat e).
The drive down is pretty picturesque through some pretty spectacular canyon country.


We'll start with Cafayate next time.




I really like college football, but at least at the end of this season I can stop hearing about Tim Tebow. He's a good college player, and he likes church, and sometimes he gets concussions. OK, I get it. Enough!