Tango and Omelette

At one stage we felt ready to exit Bolivia earlier than planned but with such a great finish to our month there we were reluctant to leave in the end, but leave we did with a typically and inexplicably slow border crossing into Argentina as we continued our journey in South America.

Vanessa's lost more weight than we thought

The land of the gaucho, the tango, arguably the best steak in the world and some of the finest wines await us but unfortunately the prices are much higher, particularly the accommodation, so we may be limited to a couple of cheeky glasses of Malbec once in a while. Our first destination was the small northern town of Humahuaca, a pretty place with cobbled streets and one resident mosquito which obviously knew that Vanessa was visiting as it had a midnight feast on her forehead.

Just forty minutes south was the lovely little town of Tilcara, situated in the foothills of the Andes Mountains. Warm sunshine and blue skies made this the perfect place to stay for a few days but the strange thing was that despite booking a large, comfortable room, the  hotel owners were identical to the family from ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. Eating the stale bread roll and indescribeable jam for breakfast whilst being overlooked by the ‘family’ was an uneasy experience but somehow we summoned the courage to ask for more coffee and thankfully still managed to walk away with all our limbs.

The coloured hills of Purmamarca

We’d noticed a significant drop in the amount of English spoken so with the language difficulties we decided to adopt the Kiwi nationality for the next few weeks just in case we encounter any unwanted attention regarding The Malvinas which interestingly have ‘Argentina’ printed in brackets after them on their national maps.

We struggled to book a tour of the surrounding area but were really glad that we persevered  as we were  driven along a breathtaking mountain road to Argentina’s salt lake for more stunning photo opportunities before heading to the picturesque town of Purmamarca which sits amongst the most vivid, multi coloured hills. We were intrigued by our last stop which had been described as ‘an unmissable cemetery’ but our driver misunderstood this to be ‘a missable cemetery’ and drove straight past the turn off. We just couldn’t be bothered to get involved in another bout of gesticulating so we headed back for an evening of llama cooked in dark beer with quinoa, Andean potatoes and a cheeky glass of vino tinto. Vanessa had an omelette.