Goats clinging to vertical cliff sides, cartoon cacti, dusty Andean towns and villages, single storey adobes, narrow cobbled streets, women in blue pleated skirts, red tops, black hats the same people as Bolivia so close across the man-made border, like travelling back to pre-Inca times if not for the cars and colourful souvenir stalls filling the central square.

Purmamarca, a convenient overnight stop is overwhelmed by tourism, bad for Purmamarca but good for surrounding towns and villages as it corrals the tourists. Its draw, the Hill of Seven Colours is attractive but small beer after the amazing Cafayate gorge. Humuaca, a town of c20,000, largely unspoilt, apart from the large showy carbuncle monument to a hero of independence.

Tilcara's pre-Inca hilltop fortress remains, torn down a century ago by archaeologists only interested in digging for (non existent) buried treasure, the piles of jumbled stones used 40 years later to reconstruct some of the buildings and erect a large monument to those early 'archeologists' thereby destroying the site of the Inca central plaza.

Tastil, a tiny village with one room museum of artefacts from nearby pre-Inca ruins, remarkably preserved pieces of woven llama wool fabric, crude llama paintings on stones, bone combs like modern nit-combs. Two minutes to answer her user-profile questions, two minutes to look around. How old are they I ask? Millions of years she says.