After a very long all day bus ride on Thursday I finally made it to Salta, Argentina, the last country of my trip! Only four days late though haha.
Let's start with some of the weird/interesting things I've noticed so far being in Argentina. First off they eat supper so late here! Honestly a nine or ten o'clock supper is considered early and usually people eat around eleven or twelve o'clock. How crazy is that! Even if they have little kids they eat late, all depending on when the kids go to school. Which brings me to the second different thing, the kids go to school in two chunks. Some kids go to school in the morning from 7 30 until noon, and the rest go from 1 30 to six. This isn't just for little kids either, all ages have this schedule. So that's pretty different.
And my third weird thing I've noticed is platform shoes..they're everywhere! It's insane and they look so awful, but so many people wear them. And I thought maybe its becuase they are short, but that's not the case, I have seen many people of average to tall height wearing them too. The thing is that they are not even nice shoes and some of the people wearing them can hardly walk in them haha. So that's definetly weird as far as I'm concerned.
Our first night in Salta we got in quite late so all we had time for was supper and they we went straight to bed becuase we had to be up early for our Cafayetes and Villages day tour.
This was a pretty interesting tour I found becuase we got to see a lot of cool rock formations. Our tour took place in the Cafayetes Valley and the Shell canyon, given its name becuase the sedimentary rocks that form the canyon were once underwater and are filled with various shell fossils.
We got to see the canyon which was really cool becuase all they layers of rocks were different colours. There was grey, various shades of brown, red, green, yellow and white. The different colours are caused by the various minerals in each layer, for example the green is causes by copper and the red by iron. Pretty cool and so beautiful to see.
We also got to see various rock formations like the Devils Throat and Amphitheater. These were really cool. Both formations were huge and caused by water erosion. The Amphitheater was given its name becuase of the amazing acoustics inside. There were people singing when we were inside and it was incredible sounding. The Devils throat was also cool, it was similar in the sense it was a huge open space in the rock, but instead of being all open it had rocks jutting up in random spots and wasn't completely eroded all the way down. This made it more echo-y inside rather then having good acoustics. Both were quite cool.
On this tour we also went to a winery where we got a tour, learned about their product, and got to taste the wine. It was an interesting little bit getting to see the grape fields, but I'm not to much of a fan of wine and this wine was no exception. I tried both the red and white wine, but I didn't really like them haha.
A lot of the tour was driving and stopping at very beautiful spots along the way to take pictures. I also noticed how Argentina seems to be more modern then the other countries I've been to in South America. All and all it was an interesting tour with lots of cool rocks to see!
After some little scheduling problems, we made the decision to fly to Puerto Iguazu instead of take the bus. Thank goodness becuase the bus ride would have been 30 hours long and would have made it so I had no days in Buenos Aires! So we opted to fly instead and it was a great flight, just under two hours and it went smoothly.
Once we got to Iguazu we settled in for the night and had some supper, again we got in late so we didn't have time to do much before it was time to sleep.
This brings us to today and our Iguazu Falls day tour. It was amazing! Definitely one of the best things we've done on this trip. It was stunning. There are so many waterfalls and the sun made rainbows everywhere, it was such an incredible thing to see.
We walked two trails they have at the park and took a boat ride as well. We started with the upper trail which was higher up so you had a paneramic veiw of the falls and some parts of the path you were even on top of some of the falls! It was so nice to look at and even though we couldn't see all of the falls (they're huge and its rained a lot so some were closed) we still saw so many and I couldn't believe there were more.
The second path was called the lower trail. This was cooler yet because some parts of the path you were beside it and you had to look up at the falls. The best part of this path was a little walk way that went out into all the mist of the falls and of course Alyssa and I went out there and attempted to get some pictures with a the camera in the plastic bag. Haha. That was pretty fun and we definetly got wet.
Our last part of the tour we got to take a boat ride which was so awesome! The boat took us to two seperate parts of the falls and each time they would stop a little ways back so we could get some awesome up close pictures and then they would drive right up to the falls so you got hit with water and sprayed with mist and were so close to the actual falling water!! It was such a rush and an awesome experience. There is no better was to see the falls and even though I was soaked after haha it was totally worth it.
The Iguazu falls were so beautiful and one of my favorite parts of my trip for sure.
Argentina is the last country I'll be visiting on my trip and its quite a nice country. I find it very different from the other three especially in terms of weather. All the other countries were dessert, sand and rocks. It was very dry and got quite cold at night. Here is it sub-tropical and that's quite different. It's warm here all day (I finally got to wear shorts again!), the nights don't get that cold and its very humid here. It's quite a nice change though. Everything here is green too, there is so much growing all around and that's very different from a few cacti in the desert haha.
I only have a few days left on my trip and we still have a long bus ride and Buenos Aires left to explore before I head home. I like Argentina so far and I'm looking forward to exploring Buenos Aires!