Hey Guys

Cafayate now. It took 4 hours to get here from Salta, the road went along the Quebrada de Cafayate, which is where our bike ride was the next day. We got to Cafayate, again got accosted by a heap of representatives from hostels. We went and had a look at the biggest one, then we said we might camp, so they took us to a different hostel and showed us the backyard. We said no, we'd rather stay somewhere where there are actually other people camping. So we got dropped back at the square, where we walked south, and saw 4 or 5 real camp grounds. Only 2 had tents in them, so that that narrowed it down. We chose the one that the book said had hot showers. We actually both did get hot showers on the last night we were here.

Camping in this instance is cooking with fire, no gas, washing by hand (which we've been doing the whole time anyway) and buying the meet just before we cook it. Its very cheap though- less than 4 aussie dollars a night.

First full day, we hired bikes, and loaded them on the bus to Salta (BJ wheeled hers through some pink paint first, which was funny). The bus let us off 50 km up the road, where the sandstone formations of the Quebrada start. There are some pretty cool formations, and they've given them names like The devils throat, the auditorium, the titanic sinking. Hope to put some photos on sometime. So the deal was, get dropped off with your bike, and ride back. But its a hard slog, and it is a hot dry landscape. The 4 or 5 other tourists who did the same thing all chickened out part way and caught the bus home. But that was the midday bus from Salta, which gets to Cafayate after 4pm. We saw the bus go past when we were about 10km from town, and we got back about 5. So those people didn't get back much before us. We ran into them at the ice cream shop afterwards. They had obviously got back, returned their bikes and had a shower. We were exhausted. We drank a 2.25L bottle of fanta between us before we got to the campsite.

Next day was another, shorter, trek on foot. The guide book talks about a hidden waterfall that you can walk to from town. We left fairly early, and it was about 5km on a road till you get to the river, dogs that had followed us back to the campground the night before followed us from town. When we got to the river, a guide popped up out of nowhere and offered us his services. We turned him down, our reasoning was we knew we had to go upstream, and the waterfall is obviously on the river. So we walked upstream, the book says for 2 hours but it only took us 1. We got to the first waterfall, which was nice, but we thought we'd just check to see what was around the corner, and there it was about a 12m waterfall. The dogs couldn't make it across the river the last time we jumped across, so they stayed about 5min walk downstream, and we heard them yelp from time to time. When we turned to go back, we saw some people walking away in the distance. They obviously hadn't seen the big waterfall. So they assumed the little one downstream was it. and the dogs had obviously got sick of waitiong for us, and had followed them back, so now we were dogless. Back at the intersection of the road and the river, we ran into the pikers from yesterday, and we made sure we told them to keep going past the little waterfall, because we thouht they were likely to give up.

We went back to town then and bought tickets to Tucuman for 6am the next morning.