I’ve been in Salta for four days now without writing anything about it–including that I ended up here instead of in Bariloche. After convincing myself and everyone else that I was heading to the Lake District from Buenos Aires, I had a change of heart at the bus station and decided at the last minute to come north. So far, nothing to regret. Salta is a province in the extreme northwest corner of Argentina, right by Bolivia (where I’m going next) and Chile (where I’m going after that). The city of Salta is adorable, even though there are a ton of tourists–it’s in a sort of valley and they have all these random churches and cute little historical buildings scattered around. It’s the rainy season here, supposedly, but so far I haven’t seen much sign of it, except for the fact that the uberfamous Tren a las Nubes (Train to the Clouds) doesn’t run right now because there are so many landslides at this time of year. I was furious about that for about 5 minutes, considering that was almost the sole reason I came to Salta in the first place–but don’t worry, I got over it. Plus, I got to take the “fake train”, (my name for it–it’s actually a tour bus that follows the route of the train) yesterday and it was incredible.
The amazing thing about the mountains here is how many different kinds there are. We started out in a gorge yesterday with pretty standard brown scrubby mountains on either side… but from there we passed onto others made of giant red boulders with cactuses just perched in every crevice–the whole thing looked like it was going to collapse at any minute. Farther on there were other, completely different mountains… some with huge grooves in them from the erosion, others that had 7 or more different colored layers of exposed rock, and other, wrinkly red or yellow or grey cliffs that were completely and totally bare and towered over the road, others with snow… I could keep going, but I’m sure you get the picture.
Oh yeah, and we also visited the salt flats. I’m not going to talk much about them right now, cause I’m visiting some in Bolivia in a few days, except to say how strange it was to see this giant, completely and totally flat expanse of white right in the middle of the desert. The guide told us that the salt is up to 30 meters deep in some places. We also saw the “pools”–basically, workers hack hundreds of square holes about 10ft. x 10 x 2 in the solid salt, then when the pools fill up with water and enough salt has settled to the bottom, they collect it and sell it. But… it takes 13 hours to dig one of those things, then a year for the salt to settle… they get about 2 tons out of each one, which they sell for all of 12 pesos per ton. Doing some quick mental math, that makes a grand total of 24 pesos per pool–after 13 hours and a year. 24 pesos is about 8 dollars. Yeah. wow.
Sorry, that was a side note. Salta is one of the poorest provinces in Argentina, except for Jujuy, which is where I’m going next. The difference between here and Buenos Aires is so huge… Buenos Aires has bad places, yeah, but in general (I’m sure you’ve heard this before) it’s almost European. But here? On the outskirts of the larger towns around here, the houses are basically shacks, and there are large numbers of people in the province that don’t have running water or electricity.
It’s definitely food for thought, and more to come, I’m sure, as I head north into Jujuy province (that’s pronounced Hu-Hooey, by the way) and then Bolivia. Tomorrow I’m leaving at 5:30am for Humahuaca, a tiny little town about 5 hours farther north, then on Tuesday I’m hopping the Bolivian border. None of that was in my original travel plan at all, but right now I’m psyched, and believe it or not, It’s actually really cool to travel alone (not that you can exactly be ALONE at the hostel, but you know what I mean).
