Salta Aug 2nd.

WEDNESDAY 2nd August

Salta, Argentina.

We have been unimpressed with our guide so far.  For some reason he told us yesterday that there wasn't much to do in Salta and he didn't know why Intrepid stopped here.  He believes that we should be staying in a small town 170 km further south. So... he offered a wine tour at this town for any takers and six of our group took him up on his offer even though there is also a wine tour in Mendoza in two days time for those that want to go on one.

After a twelve hour bus ride the last thing I wanted to do was get up for a 7am departure to drive another 340km return in order to go on a wine tour.

Lindsey and I rose around 8:30, had breakfast and headed into town to find some geocaches.  The first one was called the Cloud Train.  It turns out that there is a wonderful train journey through the Andes that used to leave from here.  It now leaves from the same town as mentioned above, 170km south of here.  They decided that the first sector was too boring!

On another km or so and we found a park with military hardware placed around it.  A tank and a few guns.  Our next find was on one of those guns.

2.5km later walking through a poorer part of town we came to some small hills where the houses had views.  There were some really flash, well kept ones here.

Another cache bagged and then we walked a further km for a Dnf.  

We then caught a cab back to our hotel.  The taxis are cheap.  We negotiated our ride for 70 pesos, about 6 kiwi.

Our plan for the afternoon was to go and find two geocaches in a suburb or town called San Lorenzo about 12km from the city centre.

To add a bit of spice to life, we sussed out the local bus route and how to get bus card.  The drivers won't take cash.  We walked to where they sold the cards and I put 25 pesos onto it.  I thought our fare would be six pesos each way but it appears that it may have been seven.

Our first cache was at the very end of the bus route in quite a nice forest park.  There were families picnicking by the running stream.  We thought that a clean free flowing stream was rather special in this part of the country.

Another cache ticked off and we walked 1.5km down the road to our last cache.

This one was outside a restaurant and the hint said to ask the manager about it - Esteban.  At this stage we weren't even sure if it was inside or outside the restaurant.

We went inside to talk to the staff.  They had no idea what I was talking about. Eventually we were taken to the manager who turned out to be the owner.  He's only owned this place for three months and he also had no idea about any geocache.

Back outside and we began our search.  Lindsey quickly unearthed a likely spot and I found a lid.  Then I found a bottle further into the hole.  It's contents were a soggy mess.  I then checked the logs and it hadn't been found for over 13 months.  We replaced the container with a watertight one that I had in my bag and added a nice new log.  When I looked up the restaurant staff were hanging out the window still trying to work out what on earth we were on about.

Mission complete we waited at the next street corner and hailed the next bus to take us back to town.  That's when I discovered that I didn't have enough money left on the card for two fares.  If the bus driver even noticed he certainly didn't care.  We find that it affords some of the best people watching sitting on a public bus.

Back to the hotel late in the afternoon for some rest and Internet time and then to meet our guide at 7pm for a briefing.

At 7 the wine tourists still hadn't returned.  We got our briefing and walked around the corner to have a steak dinner at quite a nice looking nearby restaurant.  A good plan except we were told at the restaurant that they don't start taking dinner orders until 8pm!!

We returned to the hotel to kill another half hour.  As we were about to head out again at 8 the wine tourists appeared and we all decided to go to a BBQ beef restaurant as a group.

We got three plates of grill to share between the eleven of us.  The plates were massive and contained beef steak, beef rib, kidney, sausage, chorizo and chicken.

All washed down with some local Malbec. 

All very nice but we found it pretty heavy in the gut when you don't finish until 11pm and then all we wanted to do was go to bed.