Today we left Tilcara and drove through the Quebrada de Humahuaca, which are a group of spectacularly coloured mountains to Humahuaca, which is a World Heritage Site. The town is another dusty Andean settlement, popular with tourists who gather in the village square at a few moments before mid-day awaiting the appearance of a plaster St Francis of Assisi, who slides out from behind some tin doors at the side of the Municipal Offices around about the stroke of 12 (his time-keeping is a little rusty after all these years), jerkily raises and drops his arm in benediction and then retreats back behind the doors again for another 24 hours. It´s a hot ticket as you can imagine, and five to twelve sees us jostling for top camera position along with a suddenly swollen crowd of eager tourists. St Francis duly appears, does his thing and goes back in, and, as is commonly the case with these things, we look at each other and ask ´was that it?´. Never mind, the really impressive bit about Humahauca is not so much the being there as the getting there.

The mountains that we pass both going to and coming from Humahuaca are stupendous, they are rippled with a magnificent display of colours ranging from brown, red, orange and pink to green, blue and purple. As you will see from the photos, eventually. Unfortunately I can´t post these yet as, despite our bags groaning with the curse of the modern traveller - plugs, adapters, electrical leads and charging equipment for our cameras, mobile phones, electric toothbrush, mp3 player, mp3 car radio adapter and laptop etc, etc, the one thing I´ve forgotten to bring on this trip is the lead to connect my camera to a p.c. tsk. So you will have to wait to see the photos until we are back in Buenos Aires next week.

Surprisingly, despite a heavy presence of women milling around the square trying to capitalise on the presence of so many potential purchasers by offering for sale all sorts of andean handicrafts, each while wearing a precarious tower of woolly hats embroidered with tiny llamas, we escape from Humahuaca without a single purchase, but don´t worry, I have been researching stripey good possibilities and their pricing structure ready for a full-frontal assault within the next few days. In the meantime I have become the proud owner of a small, brown, fluffy and exquisite llama I have called Lottie, who now sits on the car dashboard monitoring our erratic journey and admiring the view. Brian is trying hard not to show how fond he has also grown of her over the last 24 hours, but I can tell she´s winning him over.