A Tasting Model Broken; Pretty Churches Some Polish Cleric; a somber experience

 As mentioned the small town of Cafayate  is actual center of the Salta wine region, about 100 miles or so south of the city of Salta.  I did my usual and rented a bike for the rough and dusty roads at about 90 degrees to wineries in the area and did so with only one reservation and thought to apply my new model of bait and switch glass/tasting.

Well the wineries were mobbed all with people who seeemed ok with the reservation and tour system which rather perplexed me.  When I showed up at one of these fancy wineries on my trusty mountain bike and asked if I could drink/taste, they looked at me skeptically and said something in Spanish which I translated as "Those rubes in Mendoza may fall for that scam, but we in Cafayate hold ourselves to a higher standard" and I sadly had little success with my new wine tasting paradigm.  

The next day I was going to take a roundabout way back to Salta along the famous Ruta 40 which travels the length of Argentina.  But heavy rains overnight had me crossing small rivers and R40 and everntually I got to big enough river that my trusty Renault said "No Mas" and we had to beat hasty retreat and return by the same route which wasn't all bad as the canyon was worth seeing 2x.  

Salta has some beautiful and colorful churches as well as a statue of some obscure Polish person for some reason

And getting back early allowed me to visit the Archealogy Museo which famously displayed the well preseved remains or mummies of 3 children sacrificed by the Incas 500+ years ago and found on top of nearby volcano at around 6700 meters in 1999.  It was controversial to remove and display them but they could not leave them on the mountain once they were discovered as undoubtedly climbers would have ransacked and distrubed the remains.  They only display one at at time and I viewed the "Lightening Girl" so called as she had been burned by a lightening strike somewhere along the way, though she and her clothes were almost perfectly preserved.  It was so sad to see this 6 yr old child who had been buried alive as an offering to the Inca gods, but a moving experience.  No pics of course..  Colonialism wasn't always a bad thing as it obviously stopped such practices. 

The next day I took an 11 hour bus ride over the Andes to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, close to the Atacama desert and the driest place on earth.  That is an epic bus ride has it winds its way up the mountain pass at about 4200m and you see lamas, salt flats and huge mountains and volcanos along the way.  Shots thru the bus window aren't great ,but perhaps some idea-