So why come to Salta, Argentina? Ever heard of it? Neither had I. Until the younger daughter, in gap-yaaah mode, arrived here a couple years ago on leg 17 of her ‘Drink South America’ world tour. She fell asleep on a bus in Buenos Aires and woke up in Salta. Fine, there are bars there; what difference?

But what she found here was a stunningly beautiful little town in the middle of mountains all around it. The mountains are… err… big green ones, possibly Andes, maybe Alps, big, pointy things. Very pretty. And there, nestled in betwixt, lies Salta. But what the daughter and I (from Google images) really remembered where the wonderfully striated rocks (non-geologists skip to section D) and the salt flats.

Section D.
So tomorrow we go to the salt flats, which are about 4 hours away and staggeringly ‘wow’. And Salta, the word, has nothing to do with salt, the stuff for chips. Salta is an ‘indiginous’ word meaning either ‘between the mountains’ or ‘fantastic steaks’, I’m not great with Inca wordage.

When we arrived here we were told that Salta is very very safe. In that they don’t do muggings here, nor drive by shootings, random stabbings or drug-deals-gone-wrong collateral damage. Not like Rio then. But what is a little hairy is the traffic. Most of the junctions have no traffic lights. They have a general rule of (don’t ever) give way. Fucking EVER!! Its like a big, mulit-user game of ‘chicken’ between the cars and those stripes that might normally indicate ‘pedestrian crossing’, over here are used to get a good line on some nervous English mutha so you can get revenge for the Falklands.

But here’s something I didn’t know about Argentina until a few days ago after speaking to a couple of Swedes who we met at Iguasu. That Argentina suffers terrible inflation presently. About 35% a year. Which is awful. Invest 1000 pesos in January and its only worth 650 by next xmas. So there is a massive currency black market so they can buy dollars or Euros which will probably still be worth about a dollar or a euro next year. The bank rate for pesos is 8.6 for a US $. But the fat man with a serious roll of notes in the Square will give you 13 pesos for that same buck. For some reason they’re not keen on £ sterling. Bastards. But we brought a few dollars with us, fortunately.

And thus dinner last night, in a great restaurant, wonderful steaks (for a change), all included, for both of us came to 15 of your English pounds.

So that’s at least 7 good reasons to come to Salta. Not counting the traffic.

Happy tuesday

A xxxx

A xxxx