Salta and Area

Salta is located in the Northwest corner of Argentina, near the borders of Bolivia and Chile. Only one bus company travels there from Iguazu, so we were forced to travel FlechaBus, in semi-cama, while watching the music videos for DanceMix ´96 and eating ham sandwiches (for breakfast, lunch and dinner). It wasn´t as nice as our last bus trip and we were very glad to see the city of Salta after 26 hours!

The city itself is a mix of clothing stores, old colonial buildings and modern high rises. There are also a couple of spectacular churches and loads of great food. Our main purpose for visiting Salta had been to cross over into Bolivia for a quick tour of the salt flats before continuing south through Argentina. A look at our calender told us that there wasn´t going to be time for that if we wanted to see the rest of Argentina, so instead we booked ourselves a one day tour of the valleys that surround Salta itself as well as onward tickets to Mendoza.

Our tour started off on a sour note with our guide being nearly an hour late to collect us from the hotel, but improved once we found out that there would only be 4 people on the tour and that we would be able to see the sites that we wanted for as long as we wanted. The trip was a loop through northern Argentina near the Chilian border, visiting canyons, salt flats and crossing over several high passes. We lucked out and got clear, sunny weather which allowed us to see the spectacular colors of the various canyons we drove through, as well as enjoy the glare off the giant Salinas Grandes (salt lake).

We arrived back in our hotel exhausted after 12 hours of off road driving and site seeing, but pleased with what we had seen. The scenery was amazing, although I don´t think the photos do it justice. Its hard to capture a giant salt lake in a single photo! The two shots are of the valley we drove through before heading up to the puna (high altitude desert). The rest of the photos follow in the order of the tour.
The road up out of the valley. We climbed over 2000 m in less than 30 km, up to 4200 m.

Salinas Grandes, a large salt lake. The locals are mining for salt by digging holes through the crust, which then fill with the salty water. Once the water evaporates, the almost pure salt is collected for export.
Salt tables on the Salinas Grandes.

Vicunas on the puna. Apparently they are the producers of the most expensive wool in the world. They look like a smaller llama, which we also saw.

Cactus on the puna. They were everywhere!

Valley through which the ¨Train to the Clouds¨used to run. By this point we´d been in the same car for 11 hours and I was too exhausted to take many pictures. We also stopped at some pre-Inca ruins.