Volcanos; Flamingos, Vacunas, Lamas, and Bobbing About

One of my (regrettably many) bad habits is a tendency to forget and misplace things.  This can be a real problem when traveling as forgotten stuff turns into lost stuff.  So far I have lost my phone charger, plug adapter, money (small amount), belt, medicine and hat and nearly lost my phone, jacket, money belt, and various other items.  If I traveled long enough I would be lucky to return with the clothes on my back, though even those might be in question given that I lost my belt while wearing it (airport security).  Here is what one looks like if one loses ones hat in the desert-

San Pedro de Atacama is an amazing setting with quite a bit on offer.  Really a myriad of different scenes, activities, animals and tours.  For these reasons, it is quite popular with Europeans and South Americans, though seemingly much less so with Americans despite dollars and English being widely used.  

 You can see salt flats and flammingos--

Beautiful fresh water lakes set up against enormous mountains and volcanos (up to 20,000'+/-) often with vacunas (small lamas) or (regular sized) lamas in the foreground_-

And you can bob about in salt lakes similar to the Dead Sea where you can't sink--

You can also see the worlds highest geysers (4300 meters above sea level)-

And see almost all of the above in one place--

Riding the Paths of the Dead; Too Many Marias; Kaulbach Heaven

After a stunning 11 hour bus ride from Salta, I arrived in San Pedro de Atacama, which is Northern Chile 's most popular tourist destination and a strange place.  The place hosts 340,000 tourists per year and here is the main street-

that main street in a major tourist destination is a dirt road?

Although the place is not cheap, somehow is doesn't feel upscale.  In any case, tours are very popular here and virtually every establishment on the main street is tour agency.  It has to be the world capital of tour agencies.  I was a little concerned that I would not be able to secure some of the tours I wanted but it became more of an issue of which agency and tour to hire amid the myriad agencies and tours.

But at the recommendation of my selected tour agency I started with a self guided bike tour to Devil's Canyon which has you biking through the canyon and then ending at 1000' hike up a small mountain.  It was quite the 45 minute bumpy ride to get out there, but This low cost tour/experience was terrific and a unique experience as you wound your way through the tight walls of a canyon.  The entrance looked like entering the Paths of the Dead from Tolkiens LOTR but I braved it -

Not sure I needed the neon yellow shirt as there was no traffic-

Somehow along the way my  bike lock bounced away and I lost it.  What kind of a bike lock is that?

  Reminds me of Argentine bridge maintenance

In the afternoon I toured the famous Valley of the moon so called as it allegedly !ooks like the surface of the moon.  You can judge for yourself-

The Luna (Espanol) Parc (more espanol) had a formation called the 3 Marias   I have known  one Maria which  seemed enough

You can sand board down the these sand hills and I would have done it but I did not want to embarrass the natives with  my rookie aplomb

San Pedro De Atacama is of course set in a desert and so one is always drinking water and this sign seemed superfluous (the whole place is an evaporation zone from what I an tell)

All of the land is composed of 70% salt, kind of a Kaulbach heaven (we love salt on our food)

 Alas my days of enjoying $6/btl Malbecs have ended and I have been reduced to this in Chile (a vertible shot glass)

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-

Salta; Detours; Pelted by Rocks; Goats and Cafayate Canyon

 I flew from Mendoza to Salta a city in the northwest of Argentina known for its Andean culture and as Argentina's second wine region.  I did not realize it but the center of the Salta wine region is actually about 120 miles to the south in a small city called Cafayate.  What is 120 miles between friends?  

So I rented a car and headed back south.  I have rented 3 cars so far in SA and each one has been French, one Peugot and 2 Renaults.  Come to think of it I think the last time I was here I think all of the cars I rented were French, as was the car  I rented in South Africa for a month.  While they seem to have no part in the U.S. market, they appear to have a stranglehold on the low end overseas rental market (I always get the cheapest car available) in South America and Africa.  Leave it to the French to discover a market know one has ever thought of. 

There are in Argentina frequent inexplicable police stops and detours often due to washed out roads (surprisingly, I found Salta a surpringly green place with not infrequent rain storms where it rains quite hard and easily overpowers the Argentina road system).  At one point, i got blocked enroute by the police, but Google maps provided no alternate route and there were of course no detour signs.  The Argentine police apparently do not have a grasp of good solid European Spanish or English with a clear Spanish accent and so I was left to my own (and my French rented car) devices.   I flailed around the back streets of whatever dusty and forsaken Argentine town I was in watching my phone battery dwindle.  I finally pulled over in some neighborhood where seedy would have been a compliment and studied the phone map when suddenly I heard a "BLONK!" and felt my Renault shudder a little.  I got out and looked about and saw that some friendly local had pelted me with a fair sized rock (still rolling away).  Seeing no obvious adversary about, I jumped back in my trusty Renault and went back to the police road block and handed my iPhone to the no ingeles policeman who showed me the (20 mile) detour on Google maps and I sped off and luckily saw the handwritten 'route 23' sign which took me around the  road closure.'

Enroute I did see a road sign with my name on it-

I had read that the trip from Salta to Cafayate which went thru the Quebrada de Cafayate (Cafayate Canyon) was one of the great road trips in Argentina, which considering Ruta 40 and Patagonia, etc, is actually saying something.  And it definitely did not disappoint tho pictures do not really capture the stunning scenery or subtle different colors-

I have seen some great canyons in my travels, but i would say Quebrada is better than all but the Grand Canyon and even there the multi-hued colored rocks (tough to capture in photos without perfect lighting) are unmatched--

It also offered lamas, jack asses (4 legged kind) and... Andrea's beloved (wild) goats-

When I finally rolled into Cafayate, like Zermatt years ago, I got caught up in a local wedding-