Argentina!

Another day another country! We had an amazing bus journey (8hrs) from Chile to Argentina via desert and mountains. Luckily the border control wasn`t nearly as strict as Peru to Chile and didn`t insist on searching our bags every few hours (no joke) but it did take an hour and a half for our entire bus to get checked and stamped. We drove through some very changeable desert, from vast open rocky spaces to colourful mountians and volcanoes. The scenery changed dramatically as we entered Argentina and became lush vegetation on mountainsides then massive areas of rainforest. We drove down one side of the mountain, which was mostly hairpin bends, in a thick white cloud, quite a scary experience. We also drove past the seven coloured mountain, the main tourist attraction of the area (for free!) which was largely what it says on the tin but also an incredible sight of blues, pinks and purples.

Who-who-ey

We only had a day and a half to spend in San Salvedor de Jujuy (pronounced Who-who-ey!) but we managed to find an excellent hostel near the main shopping area (no time for shopping sadly) with a kitchen, board games and a lovely guy who ran it. Surprisingly it was an HI hostel, we´ve not had the best of luck with HI hostels so far, so we were pretty pleased. We spent our time looking round the city and visiting an archeological museum which only cost 17p to get in! To be fair it was very similar to Bewdley museum but it did have a big cooking pot with skulls sticking out of it. We also cooked a lovely meal and had a great bottle of Argentinian wine for under 1 pound!

We`ve really noticed how different Argentina is to other countries we`ve visited and we`ve only been here for a couple of days. It`s much more European than say Peru or Bolivia and we don`t get stared at all the time, even though Jujuy had no other tourists as far as we could see. We`re really excited about visiting the rest of Northern Argentina as we`ve had a great first impression: vibrant cities, friendly people, amazing scenery and extremely cheap wine. They also have Cadburys Dairy Milk!!!!!