I really wish you all could have seen what's in the left quarter of this picture. You wouldn't even believe it if I tried to describe it. It was so cool. The coolest thing I've ever seen, ever.
This is the boarding area for the cable car to the top of the mountain in the city of Salta, Cerro San Bernardo. Keep your eye on the married couple buying tickets.
Here they are again! A lovely French couple from the city of LeMans. They spoke neither English nor Spanish, and I relished this opportunity to be more cultured than a couple of snooty French people. Where do they get off, anyway?
Anyway, I was nice enough to them long enough for them to take my picture.
Do you see the cloud in this picture? That's how high up this cable car goes. I would have been terrified, but I saw a plaque that said the thing was made in Switzerland.
There it is, the city of Salta, Argentina. It's a nice town. The people are friendly, the streets are pretty convincingly paved (downtown), and they've got some beautiful colonial buildings (not pictured). The top of this mountain turned out to be kind of a bust, though. There were lots of bees, and some people selling the same Artesanal bric-a-brac available in tourist traps the length of the continent. Also, they had stopped making lunch by the time I got up there. I was starving. The lemonade was good, but a bee flew into it.
Anyway, this is Stan, from Hong Kong. He was staying in my Hostel, and we decided to hit up the tour to the mystic city of Cachi. This tour was definitely the highlight of my trip to Salta. Stan and I were laughing it up in the back of the bus, because he's a pretty rad guy. He doesn't speak Spanish, he barely speaks English, and he decided to quit his job as an electrical engineer to travel all over South America doing landscape photography.
This was our tour guide (Check out the super-official khaki outfit). Once these two old ladies stopped paying attention he started hitting on the two girls from Buenos Aires in the front. I took this picture right after he said, "The Black Widow is a small spider, but so dangerous."
We'd stop every once and a while to hop out and take pictures. Some of the road was flooded out from the rains the night before, so every time I got out of the van alive I felt like I had accomplished something. This is another friend of mine from the Hostel.
Here's a little cemetery we passed on the way up the valley.
That sign says "Put your batteries in me," which is a play on words in Spanish. It doesn't mean what you think it does. Also, when we were having coffee here the tour guide and I got to talking about studying German. When it turned out that we had both taken it in high school he said to me (not about the woman in the picture), "This chick has a totally nice ass."
This is a FUCKING GAUCHO. This photograph is not staged. That's how much I keep it real.
The road in the background is called "La Cuesta del Obispo." It was built by Indian slaves in order for an extremely fat Bishop to cross the hills and proselytize to the people on the other side. In addition to having to build the road, they had to carry the Bishop, who couldn't walk too far because of his gout.
Here's a monument to the simple faith of these decent country people. Painstakingly constructed on the top of this mountain. Note the clouds are actually lower than the chapel. Nobody lives up here.
Anyway, we finally made it up the valley and into the high deserts of Salta. I bought a bottle of wine on the side of the road, guaranteed to have been stamped by genuine artesanal peasants. This is me with Argentina's national cactus, the Cardon.
Cachi, principal street, noon.
Llama.
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