After our late arrival into Salta the night before we sleep in and have a very lazy morning in bed. Our hostel has free breakfast and for the first time in two months we eat cereal! Just plain old cornflakes, but after two months of rock hard stale bread with funny flavoured jams, boy do those plain old cornflakes go down a treat. The rock hard bread was starting to wear on us a little.

Our hostel also has some pretty speedy WIFI, so we upload our photos to the web to keep them safe, get some laundry done and eventually head into the central plaza after midday for a bit of a look. We spend a few hours just chatting and writing out postcards in the sunshine. We'd been sitting on the grass in the plaza but we get moved along and made to take a seat on a park bench instead. Right, so no sitting on grass in Salta. Noted. We walk to Parque San Martin and get the gondola to the hills above town for views over Salta and the Lerma valley. The view isn't actually all that good but there are a heap of waterfalls and features in the gardens at the top of the gondola which are its saving grace and which entertain us for a short while.

Back down in the park we get icecreams in the hot spring temperatures and Ryan buys a pair of aviators. We watch people in pedal boats and row boats dodge each other on the small pond in the park and wander back to our hostel.

Later we meet Amy and Dave, all in our finest backpackers clothes, for a dinner at El Solar del Convento, one of the best restaurants in town. We are given complimentary glasses of champagne, breads and a salsa dip and garlic butter to start. Then we get down to the serious business of choosing which cut of steak to have. The boys both go with the standard Bife de Chorizo (thick sirloin) whilst us gals get smaller steaks, which come with a couple of sides, mine with some delicious creamy potatoes.

When the steaks come out they have us all exclaiming over their size, they are the biggest hunk of meat we've ever seen, some 5cm thick and covering a substantial portion of the plate too. And there is nothing else on the plate. Just the steak. We wash our meals down with a tasty bottle of Malbec, and are too full to even contemplate desert. All up, for the two of us, our meals and share of the wine came to around 120 pesos, so £20 or just $40 NZ dollars. Ridiculously cheap!

The following day starts with another lazy morning before we meet Amy and Dave and head into see one of the city's museums. When our tummies start to growl we hunt down some lunch, eating some of the most rubbish food we've had in ages. And it took ages to come. Ryan had a steak sandwich with cold fries. I had soggy pasta bolognaise and my desert didn't turn up. Bad, bad, all bad.

We head back to our hostels for a siesta and meet up again later for dinner. We get some picnic foods and beers from the supermarket and have a picnic dinner in San Martin Park on the grass. Two dogs hang quietly about hoping for some titbits, and we oblige eventually, because they were so well behaved. When the snogging of couples up against trees gets a bit much for us, we take our leave, with the dogs following us!