ODO: 347,795
We wake up to hot sun and blowing wind. Gil, the rhea, comes over to say hello. There are some bread ends we wont eat, so we feed Gil. Big mistake. The caretaker said we could feed him bread, but failed to mention this would make Gil follow us around too closely. This is not helping us finish installing the Starlink…In the middle of which, a gentleman on a scooter stops by to tell us the word of God. Since he doesn’t seem to understand we are busy, KoKo asks him if he can come back when we’re not working. Once the new Starlink is installed and working, Berne discovers the direction it’s oriented in, while flat, makes a difference. In our case, we installed it in the slower orientation. A quick 90 degree rotation has up back up to 100mbps+ speeds. After working in 100F heat all day, the cold showers at the campground are very appreciated.
Very loud thunder wakes us in the middle of the night. We watch lighting, in the distance, on all sides of the truck for a little while before going back to bed. The next time we wake up, it’s to pouring rain and pounding thunder. Not the best weather to pack up in, so we wait until it blows over. The storm has turned this small road from the campground into, as Berne likes to say: snot on ice. We slide off the road into a shallow, water filled ditch. KoKo finds a big stick to explore the ditch and see if we can just drive out of this, and luckily we can! Back on the main road, we hit a bird square in the center of the grill. Big thunk. Amazingly, it does no damage! Our goal is the edge of a national park we hope to explore in the coming days. On the way, we luck into a delicious empanada dinner. All in all, a quiet, but good birthday for Berne.
Our day starts with a resupply before heading into Parque Nacional Calilegua. The road immediately turns to dirt, and we start to climb. Off to a good start. We wind up into the mountains, and things are very jungle-y, which is unexpected. We drive through the very cute and touristy San Francisco before finding a stream to take a break next to. The truck needs some cooling off, and we get to try and photograph tadpoles. As the jungle gives way to desert, the wind starts to pick up. And we start to see donkeys! We haven’t seen them in forever, and we love them because they remind us of Baja. We also start seeing Vicuna again, the wild alpacas. Our day started at 1900ft and 85F, and at one point we get up over 15,000ft and down to 47F. As we get close to the end of our day, passing through a small town, an older lady waves us down for a ride. This is very common here, essentially hitchhiking. She was very dismayed when we showed her we did not have room for a passenger. We end the day with some chili in the desert, around 10,000ft.
The full dark and full quiet overnight are sublime. We haven’t wild camped in what feels like forever. Unfortunately the altitude makes sure we don’t sleep as well as we wanted. We start the day slowly, enjoying the desert solitude, sort of. Several people on mountain bikes, and a couple of people in cars stop by our camp. After packing up, into town for gas, and then back the way we came to visit the Mountains of 14 Colors. They do not disappoint. We didn’t count the colors, but there were many. Then we are off to the most major road (still dirt), in a general southern direction. We pass the Tropic of Capricorn, the road side marker is not up to normal Latin American standards. We end the day in a wash, at a lower altitude than last night. Hopefully we both get some sleep tonight.
We didn’t make it to a low enough elevation last night, one of us was up with a headache throughout the night. The upside, we wake up in a beautiful canyon with low, dramatic clouds. We hit the highway and head straight to Salta for some altitude recovery. Points get us into a nice Sheraton for a couple of nights. KoKo made dinner reservations while we drove, for a place we saw on the internet. It’s the tango show we missed in Buenos Aires! The food is terrible, but the show is great! It starts with dancers, then the dancers play some drums, then the dancers dance around knives, then they dance blindfolded! The show finishes with a live band that plays many crowd favorites, based on the large percentage of the audience singing along and waving their napkins. We get home very late.
We spend the day hiding from the weather. And one of us is double unwell because they ate too much of the bad steak last night. We explore the hotel, and catch up on work. And we discover the hotel makes a killer empanada….
The museum of High Altitude Archeology is in Salta, so of course we’re going! It’s a small museum that houses some of the Andean mummies. We don’t know this until we arrive, we just like museums. They have three mummies, and currently, “the boy” is on display. This is the first time either of us have seen actual people being held in a museum, and we did not like it. The way the mummies are preserved, they look like they are about to stand up and walk away. The dryness of the high altitude Andes preserves the bodies extremely well, its very off-putting. We spend less than an hour in the museum. We leave feeling odd. In an attempt to recover our day, we wander around the touristy part of Salta for a little while, and pick up empanadas to take back to the hotel. Tonight we pick a good steak house for dinner, and are not disappointed. Because we have never acclimated to Argentinian dinner time, we are the only people in the restaurant for about an hour, even though its already 8:30pm. Our dinner is delicious, and we head back to the hotel full and happy.
