Cordoba, Salta, and the Border to Bolivia

Cordoba didn´t get much better, though it had its moments. Our second day in Cordoba we did an excellent guided mountain climb. It took about 7 hours round trip, and the view from the top was spectacular.

However, the following day (when we were actually back in Cordoba) was not very good. We went in the morning to mail a package of souvenirs to Toronto. It took almost four hours to do, and not because we didn´t speak Spanish. We talked to Julio, a very pleasant gentleman in line before us, and he said the wait was standard. HE also correctly guessed our age within two years. He said he knew because we looked ´young, but with experience´. Because we took so long at the post office, all the museums were closed once again once we were ready to visit them, so we spent most of the day hanging out at the mall until our overnight bus came.

Salta was much nicer. The city was filled with beautiful buildings including a stunning church painted in maroon and gold. The highlight of the city was seeing an Incan era mummy at the museum. The mommy was of a child sacrifice entombed alive at the top of a Andean mountain. Because of the cold temperatures, the mummy´s skin and clothes were also perfectly preserved, only darkened. Unlike an egyptian mummy, the body looked pretty much like it would have when the child died. We also did a one day tour which took us to see coloured hills, the well-preserved remains of a pre-incan city, and the Argentinian salt flats.

At the end of the tour, instead of returning to Salta, we asked to be dropped off in the pretty (but touristy) little town of Pumamarqua, halfway to the Bolivian border. The main glitch we experienced in Salta was when we were getting ready for bed on the fist night. Evelyn closed the bathroom door while getting ready and the lock broke, trapping her inside. 45 minutes and a visit from the locksmith later, we finally were able to rescue her :-)

From Pumamarqua, we caught a bus to the Bolivian border. The crossing was super easy. Once we said we were Canadian, the customs officer sighned and stamped all the necessary forms before even asking to see our passport. We crossed the border into the small Bolivian town of Villazon and had to kill the afternoon while waiting for a bus. Happily, there was some sort of children´s festical that weekend so we watched rows of cute little children line-dance past, some while wearing fake miner´s hats or more traditional garb.

We caught a bus to Tupiza, a common stop on ´the Gringo trail´, and a starting point for the famous ´Southwest Curcuit tour´, which I will discuss in the next post. We relaxed our first day there, and met a couple of really cool American girls named Ally and Leila. They convinced us to join them the next day on a ´triatholon´tour which involved driving, horseback riding, and biking past the magnificant rock formations which surround tupiza. I found the horseback riding scary, but the girls all found the 16 km winding bicycle descent down narrow gravel roads terrifying.

The following day, we left for the four day southwest circuit tour.