Jill: "Why has that cow only got one long teet?"

Salta has been our favourite place so far. It's in the north-west of Argentina. The landscape looks like a Western movie: cacti, dust and huge red mountains. Salta is a region, but we started our stay here from the town Salta.

There's a bright pink church in the town square which has a very ornate front. If you walk down the side of the church it looks just like a warehouse: a plain square building in need of some paint. If I was a better writer I might be able to think of a way of explaining this in a clever analogy for religion in general.

In Salta we met a pair of German friends, a man and a woman in their thirties, who were travelling together. They had hired a car and invited us along for a day trip. We drove north to Jujuy (pronounced 'hu huey') past the Seven Coloured Mountain, which really is. The mountains seem unnaturally coloured - bright blues, greens, reds, and oranges sit side-by-side. In valleys the vegetation is lush and farmers grow crops, everywhere else is dusty and dry.

We visited the Salinas Grandes. Argentina's answer to the Salinas Uyuni of Bolivia: salinas is the word for a salt plain. The Grandes is much smaller than Bolivia's Uyuni (where all the backpackers head). The former is surrounded by mountains whereas the latter allows you to look in all directions and see nothing but flat white cracked salt to the horizon. People go there to take pictures in which they are tiny enough to stand on someone's hand, as there's nothing around to give perspective. We didn't think it was worth the four days on a bumpy crammed Jeep journey in order to take an 'hilarious' picture: so we took the easy trip to the Argentinian version.

Afterwards we continued with our German friends and found a small town called Tilcara in the mountains and rented a cabana for the evening, ensuring it had it's own BBQ first. We bought more than enough steak and wine for the four of us and cooked under the stars with horses and stray dogs gathering nearby to see what was going on.

Inspired by the drive, once the German's had to travel onwards, we rented our own car. We drove it south to the town of Cafayete. The letter Y in Argetina sounds like 'sh', and so this is pronounced 'Cafashatay'. (The double L is also pronounced 'sh': this means that the word for towel, 'towalla', is pronounced, 'to-washya' in Argentina - and Jill is pronounced 'hish', which I enjoy reminding her). Cafayete is much smaller than the regional capital, Salta, but it has more charm. We had arranged to meet up with a Swedish couple, who we had first met in Uruguay.

The road from Salta to Cafayete is the most beautiful I have taken. Undulating, winding roads, huge jagged deep-red mountains, valleys where wild horses drink from streams, a cloudless blue sky. We must have stopped ten times in two hours to take pictures or just stare. The nearer you get to Cafayete the more vineyards you pass: after Mendoza which is further south, this is the second largest wine producing region. We stopped in several and had a free wine tastings as it would be rude not to.

Us and the Swedes drove to a nearby lake and went for a swim from a jetty. The idyllic experience was dampened by little blood-sucking flies which left scars on our legs for six weeks. Afterwards we ate lunch next to a farm. In the midst of 'healthy' country smells we ate our packed lunch and Jill asked, 'why has that cow only got one long teet?' Insert your preferred joke about it not being a cow you'd like to milk.

We gave the Swedes a lift back to Salta where they were getting a bus to Chilli and we were flying to La Paz, Bolivia. Our little Corsa hire-car was crammed to the brim with luggage but we got there fine. Salta was now in a heat wave. While England had the worst winter in one-hundred years, we were in 42 degrees centigrade.

Before leaving Argentina for good we had our last (steak) supper and it was the best so far. I excelled myself managing to eat all of eight-hundred grammes. Sadly there was no medal, but I'm sure I still have the remnants in my intestine as a trophy.