Salta la Linda

Getting into Salta we were so tired that the driver of the bus nearly left the station with us still on the bus as we were asleep on the back seats. Thrown off gently, we decided to walk round to a different hostel than the one we had booked, purely because it was closer. This decision would shape the next few weeks as it happened.

Pretty much as soon as we stepped foot in the hostel we started chatting to a Kiwi bloke called Matt (Mitt) who said we should 'defo' stay there as it was a good laugh and a well run hostel. We followed his advice and soon met his mates too, Ange, Dana and Clint (Clunt). Cool dudes the lot of them. This first meeting was the last time we would have a conversation where the word cunt wasn't used as a noun, verb and adjective.

Hel also made friends with a cat that weighed the same as a Fiat Punto.


That afternoon we were surprisingly active and went up on the gondola to the top of a mountain that allows you stunning panoramic views of the whole of Salta.







And a fuck load of big spiders too.





At the end of our excursion we met a lad from Cumbria back in the kitchen of the hostel, his name was Laurence and he was incredibly hung-over. We got chatting to him for a while about where he had been and it turned out we were heading in the same direction. Indeed, as we found out later, so were the Kiwis.

Helen and I had originally planned to stay three nights in Salta, but luckily we noticed that the train that we would be catching in Bolivia doesn't run on Sundays [see, this blog can be useful], and so we ended up leaving on the Friday night with the Kiwi Quartet, Loz and, incredibly, Sam who had turned up out of the blue about three hours before we left. So mob handed we all went on up to the border to get to Tupiza.

We crossed the border at about six in the morning with no problems and even received a reasonable rate on the money that we exchanged. We then had a long wait until we could catch the train to our next destination, so we wandered around trying to find a place to watch Manchester United eventually lose to Liverpool. Wonderful stuff.

Loz wandered off after this bad result for his team and bought a selection of toys that we could do interesting perspective shots with on the Salt Flats. He did not fail.

On the train we had to endure a horrific Japanese soap dubbed into Spanish that as far as we could tell was about a woman crying. It was the stuff that nightmares are made off. I would rather have wasps sting my eyeballs whilst rats nibbled at my ball sack for three hours a day for the rest of my life than have to watch another minute of that hell.

When we got to Tupiza, not unlike The Sundance Kid, Helen started to feel queasy. It was the beginning of the massive onslaught of altitude sickness that would plague her for the next two weeks. That evening we went to a place called The Alamo and had some awful food, made worse by the fact the owners had decided to put The Greatest Hits of Shania Twain DVD on. On repeat.