Despite our fondness for La Paz, we were ready to leave the drama behind us and make our way to romantic Argentina. To get to Argentina, however, we had to endure a 33 hour bus ride/border crossing, the vast majority of which was spent on bumpy dirt roads. A stop at the peak of the Bolivian Andean passage at about 2am made it all worth while. We couldn´t continue any further because of the ice and snow that blanketed the ground during the night. We got off the bus to stretch our legs and were met with a full moon reflecting on the snow and a clear sky full of stars that seemed to hover just above the Andean peaks that surrounded us. A few hours later, when the sun began to rise and the temperature warmed to the point that the surface ice began to melt, we continued to the Argentinian border.
We arrived in Salta, Argentina at 3am after traveling for a day and a half and were surprised by the frigid, arctic temperatures of South America´s southern most country. It was interesting to traverse opposing seasons within a week, from the warm summer sun of the Peruvian coast to the arctic Argentinian winter. Salta was cold; a day stop-over was enough.
Our first destination in Argentina was the medium sized, college-city of Cordoba. In the spirit of college indulgence, we digressed into graduate school form by sampling the numerous spirits and ales that this lovely city had to offer; the taste and quality of these beverages was blurred by the quantity of consumption. We spent an unusually sunny, warm Sunday wandering around plazas and antique markets watching these Argentinian addicts suck down gourd after gourd of a tea like beverage called `mate´. These people carry around specially carved, hollowed out wooden mugs that throughout the day get filled with a large bag of leaves. They then add several large thermoses of hot water which they store in their `mate suitcases´. It seems as if the national pastime is lounging around, sipping non-stop, getting hopped up and talking about how much they wish they were European.
- JRo and JBird
No comments:
Post a Comment