Vino, Alfajores and Rafting

This is our new friend Laura. She was our roommate for two nights in Cordoba who planned to remain there for the entire month. Not when we came into the picture. We had too much fun together for her to resist a weekend jaunt with us to Mendoza. Oh and did we mention she's a German police officer? She's kind of badass.



We miss you Cinco Limon!

Before we made it to Cordoba we stayed two nights in Salta (just after our glorious 26-hour border adventure). A quaint family-friendly town in  northern Argentina, Salta is scattered with lively plazas, green parks, and tree canopies over every street. Here we fell in love with Alfajores, a traditional Argentinian sweet consisting of cookies covered in and filled with all sorts of excitement. Dulce de Leche, chocolate, apple, quinoa, white chocolate...to name a few. Frequent trips to a corner bakery may have been our downfall for the remainder of the trip. We occasionally stopped eating alfajores to actually visit things like churches, plazas, mummy museums, and to take gondola trips to the top of a mountain. We joined/interrupted a romantic date when we were forced to third-wheel a couple in the gondola just ahead of us. What a lovely ride :-)


The top of the mountain provided aerial views of Salta. This mountain had the most eclectic mix of activities: an antique silver/thrift shop, children's playgrounds, an ampitheatre, series of mini waterfalls, and a mini outdoor gym. Yes, a gym. Britney Spears blared from the exercise zone as fellow tourists and other puzzled onlookers watched locals sweat through a stationary bike exercise class. Unfortunately, we were too zombie-like from a late night to join in much physical activity.

Chocolate and white chocolate quinoa Alfajores:




In our romantic gondola:


With our pouty companions whose date was ruined:


But a lovely view from the top!


Along with cycling classes to Britney Spears:


And some serious gym rats:


A little odd?


Oh and the people watching...


We had a little date of our own! (doesn't really know what she's eating)


Llama ravioli!


We ran into nuns in quite a few places


And then there's Cordoba. Oh sweet Cordoba. The reason we just might have to re-arrange our plans to fit in just a few more days in this college town. Did we mention we're in Buenos Aires right now? There goes our itinerary. Cordoba introduced us to Limon, oddly entertaining Danish twins, Lele, Laura(!), and a night out in an Argentinan college town.

Lele, the most hospitable, friendly hostel owner making completely homemade pizza:


Lovely inseparable Danish twins who taught us Danish nursery rhymes, cooked together, worked out together, wore matching outfits, fed each other, and enjoyed a nice game of chess over tea


We also visited Alta Gracia and made a quick stop at Che Guevara's casa


And enjoyed giant lomitos. Just half was the size of our heads:


And then we had more Lomito:

In the park where we convinced Laura to come to Mendoza


It took all of 10 minutes over lomitos to convince Laura to join us for our next weekend in Mendoza, Argentinian wine country. Right away we got to know the place with the help of Mr. Hugo and his famous bike tours around las bodegas. We biked from winery to winery, and along the way enjoyed an olive farm tour (where we tried the best mustard of our lives, and added a few pounds to our packs), relaxed with a glass(es) of wine by the pool surrounded by vineyards, and lounged in a hammock shaded by olive trees. Can we please do this every day? Oh, and Christina's baby camera (not her big one, thank God) decided to take a bath in some red wine. No worries, it still works perfectly. The screen just now has a unique 3-D effect.

That's Mr. Hugo. The one and only:

We enjoyed some real asado later that night:

After a day of vino came a day of rafting. With three Irish guys from our hostel, we spent an hour in the rapids of the Rio Mendoza paddling for our lives. We will let the photos do the talking (Note that the water is brown from the glacial sediment. It's super clean we swear). But as these Irish lads say, it was a class time. Rafting was followed up by 2 glorious hours lounging by the pool surrounded by the Andes Mountains.

Our crew!

Going...

Going...

Gone...

Once You Pop You Just Can't Stop

26 Hour Border Crossing

The Bolivian border crossing that we complained so bitterly about in a previous post was nothing. A piece of cake really. That is when you compare it to our Argentinian border crossing adventure.

6:00 AM Friday: 
Board a bus in Uyuni, Bolivia headed for the border.

Keep in mind that Bolivian roads are not paved so that we get to experience the joys of off-roading through the Bolivian desert and mountains (Think Thunder Mountain Railroad, Disneyland).

11:00 AM Friday:
Bolivia. Stop for one hour. Trekk across town for a bathroom. Return to bus via shortcut. Wait, is that a dirty diaper on the ground? Pigs eating trash? Looks like our shortcut was really a walk through a dump.

12:00 PM Friday
As we make hairpin turns around switchbacks and whip along the narrow mountain ridges, solid ground is not visible from our second-level window. In our minds (aka just Monica's) we pray that we somehow don't roll right off the cliff like we (aka Monica, again) have read about in so many Internet horror stories about Bolivian buses. In this case, ignorance is bliss. Christina is not freaking out at all. We finally get comfortable and can pretend to sleep. As soon as this happens it starts to rain and we hope that the bus can handle slippery mud around the hairpin turns and mountain ridges. Next hail. Next snowstorm. Does this bus have anti-lock breaks?

2:00 PM Friday:
Arrive in Tupiza to change buses. Our bus is so late from our perilous journey that our next bus is practically rolling away and just waiting to close the doors until we hop on.

3:00 PM Friday: 
Arrive in Villazon, Bolivia. We find fellow travelers who have gone this route before so they know how to direct us to the border, about 0.5 mile with our huge backpacks. We are so happy to finally reach the border.

We walk to Imagracion Bolivia, and get our departure stamps 45 minutes later. We think we are set to get our stamp into Argentina and be on our merry way.

Midway to the other side, Christina faceplants on the sidewalk. Thank God for the front and back padding (small backpack in front, large in back). Knee scraped, ego bruised. That was embarassing.

3:45 PM Friday
We go to get in line for the Imagracion Argentina office, but they point us back to the Bolivian border, to a long line snaking across a bridge. Fantastic.

We wait in a stagnant line. Seriously, this thing did not move. It was a true turtle on crutches (for all you loyal blog followers, you will understand this reference.)

And cue the rain. Because it fell on us for the next 2 hours, as the line did not move. Its a good thing our rain ponchos were buried deep down in our packs. No way they would be accesible without us taking the entire contents of our bags out on the wet cement/dirt.

We finally get our stamps, and are completely drenched. Next stop, baggage declaration - aka another stagnant line. We finally get to the front, where the cute Seguridad has the opportunity to search our bags. Lovely, we have bags of dirty laundry in there. They also look at Christina's Trader Joe's dried, flattened bananas as though they are some sort of drug cartel. Of course, Christina forgets all relevant Spanish vocab and stares at them dumbfounded.

We finally get through baggage inspection, and ask where the nearest casa de cambio is, because we have no Argentinan pesos to pay for our cab. "Casa de cambio? En Bolivia." Andddd back to Bolivia we go.

7:00 PM Friday:
We finally make it across to Argentina and grab a cab to the bus station so we can book our bus to Salta, Argentina. Nothing to worry about, because we were lucky enough to book a bus in 2 hours! We were starving by this time since we had nothing to eat since 5:30AM, so we found a nearby restaurant for some lomitos. Luckily, we ran into our bus friends who ordered us some lomitos and fries and then acted puzzled as to why we were sitting down to this meal 30 minutes before our bus departed. What?! Oh..time change. We scarf down two lomitos and fries before we threw some money on the table and ran back to the bus station to catch our 9:00 pm bus

Oh the bus station. In the rain. Crowded with locals, babies set sleeping on the ground, dogs and gigantic satchels of who knows what taking over the tiny overhang shielding the terminal from the pouring rain. Oh the smell.

9:15 PM Friday:
9:15 rolls around, then 9:30 and our bus pulls into the lot. A mad rush of local women run to the side of the bus and start chucking their giant satchels into the storage compartment before the bus driver could even sort them. Cool. No room for our bags. I guess we will just hold them on our laps for 12 hours.
At least we know they will be safe.

We get on and there was more chucking and throwing. Locals stuffing clothes, food, mysterious satchels in any open space or corner they could find. Only to relocate and switch the location of their things randomly and sneakily throughout the ride. Many people standing over us or sleeping on the floor of the aisle.

Thirty minutes after departure we stop and several people get off. Oh...this was a local bus...and the first stop of many. At least we can get some sleep finally. Monica falls asleep instantly yet Christina was too weirded out to shut her eyes. she finally fell asleep for a few minutes and was woken up to an empty bus and an officer yelling and throwing a woman's bag off the bus. The woman begging on her knees and saying something about her papers. she runs to pick up her child who was asleep on a pile of clothing on the floor of the bus and pleads some more. whatever she said worked. Meanwhile Monica was still sleeping and wakes up when the commotion stops. Apparently we were both asleep when the bus was stopped, evacuated and searched and for some reason no one woke us up. We must have looked like little angels.

2:00 AM Saturday:
More stops, more shifting of personal items, more people on the floor and changing places and we finally made it to Jujuy at 2AM. We check our tickets and realize we have three and one-half hours to kill in an outdoor bus station in the middle of the night in Jujuy. No way were we falling asleep there. We sat there in our zombie state for a few more hours where we made friends with some Poles and Australians who were just as weirded out as us.

5:30 AM Saturday:
Finally, our bus to Salta appears and we finally feel comfortable enough to sleep because the bus was almost empty except for our Polish and Australian companions.

8:30 AM Saturday
We slept for the 4 hour bus ride so happy to finally reach our final destination after our 26 hour journey. Can we mention how pretty we looked at this point? Cherry on top: Monica lost her iPhone, which contained all of the photos of the snow/hail storm, crazy cliffs and people of our journey. RIP.

For your viewing pleasure since we lost all of the photos of our journey on Monica's iPhone:

Salty

At 4AM last Thursday morning we watched the sun rise from the crater of Sol de Manana volcano, surrounded by steaming natural geisers, about 5,000 meters above sea level. This was the beginning of the end of our salty three day tour of Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia.

Tuesday morning two Americans, two Kiwis, two Brits, and one Bolivian (our guide and driver Ovet)  piled into a Toyota Land Cruiser for three days of rugged adventure. Yes, very rugged, at least for us. A type of rugged that turned us into experts at finding the best bush or boulder to use for the bathroom, sleeping in mud buildings, wearing the same salty clothes daily, and limiting ourselves to 1 shower for the three days. Multiply this ruggedness by 7 and throw the lot into one cozy Land Cruiser. Mmmm.

These rugged three days turned out to be the highlight of our trip, and because the scenery changed so quickly it would be impossible to describe every detail. The surreal landscapes are here partly in thanks to the glaciers that covered the region over 30 million years ago and the several surrounding volcanoes that have lent plenty of minerals to the region to create quite dream-like scenes. We hope the copious amounts of photos on here will help. 

Featured on the trip: salt, green lagoons, red lagoons, salt, flamingos, pyroclastic lava rock formations, vicunas, desert, salt, llamas, salt, yaretta, volcanoes, train cemeteries, sunrises, salt, geysers, lots of jumping, hotsprings and salt. 

Our first stop: the train cemetery. Once a vital railway for Bolivia, the train transported minerals from the mineral-rich volcano landscape through the desert. However once Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came along the operation died out, and the remains of the trains were simply left to rust.

This provided a playground for tourists to climb, crawl and explore the old rusty train graveyard and dodge the sharp metal scraps while in flip-flops. Thank goodness we are up to date on our Tetanus vaccines!

I spy...

12,000 square km of salt makes Salar de Uyuni the largest salt flat in the world. One of the region's largest exports yet not a largest source of income for Bolivia. One can buy 50 kg for only 15 Bolivianos (thats just over $2), or 10 tons for $300. We were fortunate to be there about a week after it rained so we experienced the dry flats as well as the mirror-like slightly flooded flats. Because the salt floor goes on as far as you can see you feel like you are in a dream- or heaven-like state. We were half expecting Morgan Freeman's voice to come booming down upon us.

 '

Selling a few kilos of salt:

Piles of salt left by the salt miners for pick-up:

We stayed in this house in Culpina for the first night where we had a nice llama steak dinner and one of the best apple pies ever.

Why did the llama cross the road?

These rock formations are a result of pyroclastic lava (cooled slowly at a low temperature) spewed from the surrounding volcanoes around 10,000 years ago. The rocks were shale-like and sounded like glass as we walked over them.

Lake Canapa. 

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Lunch in the desert on Laguna Hidionda (Stinky Lagoon), a retired sulfer plant still sits on its shores.
Some of the best food we have had this entire trip came out of the trunk of our Land Cruiser. Thanks Ovet!

Atacama Desert, at 4300 meters above sea level, is one of the driest in the world.

Laguna Colorada gets its red color from the iron and tin and is again home to several flamingos. The best viewing conditions for the colors are on windy days.

3:30 wake up call in order to ascend to 5000 meters above sea level to the crater of Volcan Sol de Manana and natural geysers.

Sunrise just below the crater at the natural hotsprings. (Yes, more jumping photos)

Copper, arsenic and magnesium make a wonderful home to these flamingos on Luaguna Verde. The flamingos munch on the crill and plankton that have somehow made a home here too.Salvador Dali anyone?
Please excuse the lack of Spanish punctuation marks