18 hours on a bus

18 hours on a bus – surprisingly not as bad as you might think. We were on a different bus service this time, Andesmar, with cushier seats (which our bums enjoyed) and a nice temperature. The toilet was fairly awful though. The big difference was that the bus ride began with a game of bingo – yes that is right, bingo on a bus! It was good practice for our Spanish except that trying to understand as he repeated in different ways and through a muffled microphone – luckily the guy across the aisle repeated them for us in English, but we didn’t win anyway.

We watched a couple of movies, ate a bit of the very ordinary bus food, then knocked ourselves out with sleeping pills and got a really good night’s sleep – well not as good as in a stationary bed, but as good as you could hope for on a bus. The worst thing was being woken for breakfast by our grumpy bus attendant, he basically punched Amy in the arm.

Being an 18 hour bus ride meant we got to see quite a bit of country by daylight. The scenery is mountainous, we are really in the Andes now, although not at extreme heights yet. The land is covered is low scrubby vegetation and as we got closer to Salta we started to see large cactuses etc. We saw lots of birds, in particular peregrine falcons sitting on the power lines or fence posts, but also smaller hawks and a couple of birds that looks like ostriches. Also really interesting was the moss that was growing on the powerlines. In some cases it was like a little forest hanging from there, it was really interesting, I would like to know what it is. There are lots of horses grazing beside the roads and of course when you go through towns there are heaps of dogs, chickens etc.

The main crop seems to be sugarcane. There are also plenty of citrus looking trees, but being winter many of the fields are lying fallow.

We arrived in Salta at about 2.30pm and it is a lovely small city. The first view of the city as we came down a winding road was stunning, with it laid out below us. We made our way to our hostel which is just lovely. It is in an old (early 1900’s) renovated house. Our room has 10ft tall ceilings, you go through a small courtyard and up a winding set of dark wood stairs with a terracotta tile roof to get to it. Outside our window is a wrought iron grill with a red geranium in a planter box.

We were starving so just went to the nearest café. Luckily it is brilliant and seems to be a local haunt. In fact it was so good we went back there tonight and had dinner! While we were having lunch a sweet local girl who was having lunch with her parents engaged us in conversation. She was so sweet and enthusiastic, it was just a joy having a chat with her.

This afternoon we basically did some planning for the coming days including booking ourselves on a tour for Friday. To do this we managed to play various tour operators off each other. This does seem like more of a touristy town, there are heaps of tour companies but there are so many options, we really wish we could stay for a week in the area but time won’t permit.

The plan for tomorrow is to explore the city and it should be great.