Tuesday 14th January 2025: Salta mainly

Our second day in Salta before we head off into the wilderness.  From experience, we tend to do all the long distance in one go so it's all over with and then for a couple of days, just chill.  It gives us time to catch up on sleep, find our bearings, acclimatise and generally sort out issues like WiFi, SIMs and cash machines.

Our flat is well located for shops and restaurants.

Yesterday was a bit of a mooch around Salta, just watching the world go by and resting.  Today we decided to be a bit more touristy.

However our first job was to fix Kevin's glasses as the screw had fallen out.  We found it and via the power of Google identified an optician round the corner from our apartment. Initially they said it would be about £7 to fix it, which was fair.  But when we tried to pay, they refused.  How kind.

Salta acts as a base for trips to the other parts of the Argentinian North West, and there are plenty of tourist agencies offering trips to many of the places we hope to visit independently.  The most famous touristy thing to do here is to catch El Tren de las Nubes, a high altitude rail journey that used to begin in Salta and climbed high into the Andes.  Joan recalls seeing a documentary on it as a child as the train carried oxygen cylinders in case passengers got altitude sickness.  Joan wanted to spend a day on the train journey but it turns out that most of the track isn't used and you get there by coach and only do a short stretch on the train.  As we are hoping to get to where the train starts in San Antonio de los Cobres by our own means, why would we want to take a day trip by coach from Salta?

So instead we did the other big touristy thing in town which was to catch the cable car to Cumbre Cerro San Bernardo.  It was about a twenty minute walk from our flat.  On the edge of the city, it is set in a park with trees and a boating pool.  It's the Argentinian school summer holidays at the moment so there are plenty of families about.  At the cable car there was a queue that was long but orderly.  There is differential pricing - locals pay $8000 for a return journey but foreigners pay $20000 - about £15.

Vendors sold snacks to the queue and we were particularly struck by one elderly gentleman who had a plastic tub of fruit salad on a trolley which he was trying to sell.  It took 90 minutes from the rear of the queue to get in a gondola.  Joan said she hates cable cars, but Kevin says she enjoys hating them.

In the guides on the internet, it describes the cable car as "surprisingly well maintained" which can only be a bonus.  

The last time we took cable cars was in La Paz, Bolivia.  There they form part of the pubic transport system as the city from top to bottom is a mile high.

The gondolas in Salta take 5 people and we were joined by one of the staff members.  At the top we disembarked and found a recreation area with cafes, artificial waterfalls and amazing vistas of the city.  There was even free WiFi so we took a selfie.

There is also another cable car which opened last month that links Cerro San Bernardo to a further hill, but we decided to give that a miss.  Over that hill we could see paragliders.

We then caught the teleferico back down and browsed round a local artisanal market selling mate cups, toy alpacas and ponchos.  It was now getting late so we walked home.  We saw a dad, mum, child and dog get on a very small motorbike.  No helmets here!

We're kind of out of sync with the beat of Argentinian life.  Many restaurants close at three and open at 8 or nine in the evening.  The one vegan restaurant is closed for a summer break and a decent pizza place that does vegan stuff is about 3 km away.  We wanted to eat at 4 pm so we ended up going to Aires Casera, an old colonial restaurant on Calle Buenos Aires.  It has a wrought iron terrace that shaded us from the sun. 

Though they have dog eared plastic menus, the waiter gave us a WiFi code and a QR code that gave us a more up-to-date menu that had veggie and vegan options.  We ordered wraps and wedges, only to discover the wraps came with wedges.

As we ate various street sellers offered us socks and sweets, which we refused but one young man asked if he could have some wedges so we said yes.  A few minutes later a shoe shine man asked if we wanted our shoes dong but we were both wearing sandals, and he also asked for food so we let him have the last of the wedges.  It makes us reflect on our situation and good fortune.  We've seen several people sleeping rough, mainly men however, we are still haunted by seeing a family with two young children sleeping in cardboard boxes outside a corporate bank HQ in Buenos Aires, 15 years ago.

Our car arrives tomorrow and we hit the road so we went back to pack.  We also had a look at the pool on the roof of our apartment which overlooks the church.  Let's say it was small and cold!

Then we went back to our flat and settled in for the night, writing the blog and generally relaxing.  We have to move on tomorrow and have an early start so we went to bed about the time that the restaurants were reopening for the evening.