Onwards and upwards

On our last days in Argentina, we managed to cram in a few more wonderful things and places. Although this blog post may be shorter than others, it will be full of all the last minute things we did as we journeyed up to the border crossing with Bolivia!

First of, a pretty cool thing we did in Salta (the largest city in the northern province of Argentina): On our last afternoon, Ismene, Dan and I went to the teleferic that we had been longing to go to ever since we arrived in Salta! When we arrived, we realised that it was closing time and it looked like we wouldn't be allowed on as the people in front of us were turned away.  But when Dan told them it was our last day in Salta, they gave in and let us pass! Woohoo!! As we slowly crept up the hill in our teleferic, Ismene and I waved to all the people in the teleferics going the opposite direction and almost always we got a wave back! On the way back to the city the view was amazing with the now sparkling city of Salta twinkling below!

Next on our list was the outstandingly otherworldly "14 coloured mountain"! Although it's called the 14 coloured mountain, we only counted 9 colours. How many can you count from the picture below? Among those 9 colours, there was a stunningly vivid blue and a dusty red that looked out of place.

 Yet, although it was amazingly beautiful, it was also amazingly high (4400 meters above sea level), very very windy and we all felt the altitude! I think I felt it most of all and I was relieved when we headed back down the mountain.

The last place we stayed before we left Argentina was called Iruya. It was a very remote, small town up in the mountains close to the borders with Bolivia. It actually reminded us a lot of Olympos (a village in Karpathos, a Greek island). We spent the weekend hiking (we even saw condors!!) to even more remote villages where cars don't go. 

P.S. The day before we left was the presidential elections in Argentina. During our last weeks, we met a lot of people who talked about the elections with us - it seemed like a very important time for the country and people appeared equally worried and hopeful about things changing. The day of the elections, we went past a couple of people going to vote (one lady was wearing her best clothes and had freshly picked flowers in her hat) and some people thought Ioanna was a voting official from Buenos Aires! The results were announced the evening before we crossed the border and, no doubt, things will be very different in a few months time when we cross back to Argentina at the end of our trip. I would like to hope things will change for the better but, from what Dan and Ioanna have explained to us, Argentinians might be heading for even more difficult times. I hope not because I really loved Argentina...