Snakes, Spiders, Fluffy Kittens...

Salta is a city in the North of Argentina that is surrounded by many different strange natural wonders, like salt flats, cloud forests, deserts, and rumpsteak. The city buzzes with activity, and the sidewalks are very narrow and riddled with schoolchildren and piles of rubble. The schoolchildren feed on the piles of rubble, but only nocturnally.

After settling in to a hotel close to the plaza, we took a walk up the hill which is about a 10 minute walk from the hotel, called Cerro San Bernardo. At this latitude (about S 25 degrees) things are starting to get warmer and junglier in parts. This means deadly animals. The first large message we received from Pachamama to this effect was the uninterrupted canopy of giant spiderwebs (and accompanying giant spiders) during the walk to the top of the hill.

We had a short guided tour of the jungle by a very nice guy named Raoul, who explained that there are only three really deadly snake species available for use in the area. Rattlesnakes (Jarara), Coral snakes, and Deadly Green Snakes Without Clear English Counterpart (Urutu). Deadly spiders can also be encountered. More on both of these later.

We saw posters all over town... it looked like Queen was playing Friday night. So that was obviously an opportunity that couldn't be missed. We bought tickets, put leftover gin in a Nalgene bottle, and wandered into the auditorium.

It would be unfair to expect an all-around successful imitation of Freddy Mercury. But this guy had the looks (sort of... add about 50 pounds of weird gym muscle), and the "look at me all the time" disease. It was, of course, the music that suffered. But once or twice, after a lot of gin, when the lights were low and the crowd was excited, we truly believed that we were watching Queen.

There were a couple of unforgettable lyrics problems:
1) "WE WON'T, WE WON'T.... ROCK YOU...."
2) "WE ARE THE CHAMPGNONS, MY FRIENDS..."

Our first out-of-town adventure was to THE CLOUD FORESTS OF SAN LORENZO. For the first time we had to hire a guide for a mutli-day hike because the region has no maps, and because the land is mostly private. We inquired after the availability of Lando Calrissian, but he was on vacation. The guy we settled for, Rafael, met us at the trailhead at 10AM and we set out on a three-day adventure into the hills.

Rafael, who is the same age as Jen (12), was born and raised in San Lorenzo, and he has built up a relationship with the farmers that live in the valleys in the cloud forests during his time exploring and guiding. He is basically the only guy who leads treks in the region, so we felt very lucky to be doing it.

There was also a French guy who came along, named Xavier. He is a cameraman, but it's the off-season, so there he was, with us in the cloud forests. He was a very nice, funny, and relaxed guy who was a pleasure to share the experience with.

So the cloud forest is just like it sounds. You are either in clouds, looking down on clouds, or looking across valleys at clouds. At moments the forest felt enchanted and old... then the clouds would blow off and the mood would totally change. Pictures don't really do it justice, but have a look anyway.

We made close friends with cows during the hike, and camped with their waste. Cow patties are actually really clean though, I hope, right? Yeah. By the end of the trip I was using cow patties to store cooking utensils, support reading material, and as a cumin substitute.

Other highlights were chicken-squeezing contests, and getting a chance to rest for a while and hang out with some of the farmers in the remote valleys. They have lived on these farms for generations. Their homes are very simple, but they have everything they need to live efficiently and without want of goat cheese. We had a chance to taste some of the goat cheese, and it was incredible... The real deal... Full of flavours that get boiled, beaten, or otherwise factory-filtered out of North American goats and their cheeses.

On the last day of hiking Jen had a very special moment. The order of hiking was Rafa-Xavi-Jen-Neil. For the sake of reference, I will now introduce a spot on the trail which I will call Spot X. Rafa and Xavi cleared Spot X without incident. Jen approached Spot X, stopped, pointed, and screamed for her life with four or five short bursts of utterly terror-filled shrieking.

So the rest of us stopped and looked down at her feet just in time to see the tail of a meter-long snake disappear into the jungle. But it had left a bloodied rat for us on Spot X - proof that we weren't just imagining things. Jen says that the other two guys just stepped over the coiled snake as though it was a cow patty, not seeing it for what it was. By the time she had reached Spot X, the snake was freaked out a bit and decided to leave its kill for later (or maybe never).

The tragedy here is that I love snakes - the deadlier the better - and Jen doesn't. There was so much savage beauty there to be enjoyed (or screamed at, or whatever). The only savage beauty I got out of the deal was the dead rat. They are totally boring.

Back to Salta, and another week of working and walking around town. Salta is really nice. Jen likes it very much because of all the Gauchitude...

Our last weekend before leaving town we spent driving a circuit south of the city which passes through some incredible scenic ravines and valleys, and the towns of Cafayate and Cachi. We camped for three nights in municipal campgrounds/stockyards. Roosters are included - no continental breakfast.

We picked up our VW Gol on Friday afternoon. This is not a typo. The VW S.A. marketing forces have decided that it would be excessive use of plastic to include the "f" in "Golf". Really I think the explanation is that VW S.A. feared that using the name "Golf", which has achieved great purchase in Argentina as the brand name of a mixture of mustard and mayo, would cause consumers to mistake their cars for a pale-yellow condiment. On with the story...

We drove south through incredible red eroded rock formations to a place called Cafayate, famous for its white wine (Torrontés, the grape is called). We set up at what we thought was a military base campground (because of the military Land Cruiser in the parking lot), and woke up the next day eager to start a hike up to some 10m waterfalls hidden in a ravine. The walk in was amazing. The trail was not very well marked, so we felt a genuine sense of adventure finding the safest route up the river. This hike will stand out as one of my favourites I think, owing mainly to that sense of adventure.

We found the falls at last, and we were the only ones there. The water was painfully cold, but I was determined to stand under the waterfalls, just like the beautiful girls in the brochures, so out I went. The total body pain was one thing, then you get water pounding into the back of your head from 10m... That night I thought I was catching the flu, but in retrospect I think it was my body telling me never ever to do that kind of thing again.

We hiked back down and began the drive north to Cachi. This drive was very dry and lunar, with cactus forests lining the road. We decided to stop short of Cachi in a place called Molinos, because we were running out of daylight. We stayed in another campground/military base, easy to find because of the Land Cruiser parked out front... but on closer inspection I realized that this Land Cruiser had a Swiss ID sticker on the back!!! Hold on... So it turned out to be the same vehicle that we had seen the night before in Cafayate that had made us think it was a military base!

We caught up with the owners of the vehicle, a really nice Swiss couple named Claude and Erika, and part of their long and very rich story. The vehicle was a motorhome conversion of a 1997 Land Cruiser pickup truck built custom by a firm in Germany, and shipped across the Altantic into the port of Buenos Aires. The entire power system was run on diesel, including cooking, water heating, and space heating. This was not the first trip for them in their beautiful motorhome... they had been back and forth from Europe to Asia several times, and this was the beginning of what will be a 5ish-year tour of the Americas. Anyway, we had a couple of great conversations with them, and we reminisced about Yukon with Aaron and his Class-C Dodge Sportsman a couple of years ago.

The next day's drive from Cachi to Chicoana (very close to Salta) saw the scenery change abruptly, again. We started out in dry cactus forests, then up and over a high pass (3700m) into green hills and grasses covering red rocky outcroppings. Bird life here was amazing... Then back into cloud forests as we got closer Chicoana.

During the drive we zinged over something hairy and eight-legged. Ha! Savage beauty, here we come! I pulled over, grabbed the camera, and yes, we spent some time with a Tarantula in the wild. Wow. Hairy. Being so far from its crypt, or whatever they live in, it was probably going to the hairdresser's.

Now on to Chile. As in, Voodoo Chile.