A-Salta-ing the Andes

Moving further north in Argentina we started to enter more Andean territory. It was cooler here and the people started looking darker and shorter than the porteños in Buenos Aires. The bus for Chile didn´t leave for two days, so we had a bit of time to explore the town. We discovered yet more Super Panchos and 1 peso ice cream!


The Gondola offered impressive views of the city from above:

We also visited a brilliant museum where they held three mummified remains of children found 6,300 metres up on the Llullaillaco volcano. The children are believed to have been Incan sacrifices and have been extremely well preserved because of the cold and the altitude at which they were entombed. Unfortunately we couldn´t take any pictures here : (

Next stop was the cathedral in the plaza. It was pink and big.

Then it was time for some artistic culture, so we visited a contemporary art museum. We didn´t understand a lot of it, but we felt sophisticated none the less.

The delights of Salta were now at an end. We took an early morning bus north through exciting new scenery on the way to Chile.

Reaching the Argentinian border, we started to feel quite how high up we were. The border crossing was at about 5,000 metres above sea level. Matt started to feel a bit queer.