Hotel Killa Cafayate

... and refreshing - we drove up another famous Quebrada to check out the rock formations with the last couple of hours of daylight. Again, the landscape was dominated by red rocks that had been weathered into interesting and dramatic formations. The two most impressive were the amphitheatre and the devil's throat, where water had carved out narrow slots in a huge red cliff, which we walked through.

The next morning ...

... our merry ways to find this ranch...what a blinking nightmare. We walked half of Cordoba before we finally got to the bus stop, then the bus was full, then we waited for hours for our pickup...but when we finally arrived in the back @rse of nowhere it was worth it. There were three other Irish staying there too and needless to say we got stuck into our supply of wine that we bought and had a great aul chinwag before of course, climbing into our bunk beds ...

... she had a speed gun in her hand...uh oh! She explained to us that in an ´urban zone´ the limit was 40kmph and Luke had been doing 69kmph! So, what does one do in these kind of situations??...Play dumb!! We pretended we had no idea about the speed limit and that we werent quite sure what she was saying to us! She gave up after a while and just told us to keep to 40 in the urban zones and then let us go - phew!! Lucky they hadnt caught us earlier on the ...

... with us on this tour and the bloke was having a great aul time. He was all questions about amounts, goat yields and such. He took a photo of the milking room! Who the **** are you going to show that to? Maybe he was an industry spy. I learned that goats cheese smells like goats. Moutain Bikes The town of Cafayate is in a bowl surrounded by cactus covered mountains. We rented bikes and went out on a track that was, according to the ...

... riding chopper in an instant with the bolt snapping that holds the rear suspension to the swing arm, the bike pulled up pretty quick with the rear mud guard becoming a handbrake and the bike stand surfing along the dirt like training wheels. After I changed my jocks and accessed what actually just happened 2 young blokes came out from a mud brick house on the side of the road and gave me a hand to hold the bike while I ...

... it), and headed out of town to the south. Our destination for the day was Cafayate, the centre of Salta's wine region. The road out of Salta was pretty boring for the first hour, just a few tobacco farms and non-descript little towns. After a while the scenery started to get a little more interesting and we were soon following a river and entering a canyon. It wasn't long before interesting changed to absolutely spectacular. The Quebrada de Cafayate ...

... extrem gruen und dschungel maessig. Denn nochara wili haet sich wied** alles v**and**et a riesa flaechi mit see und endlich endlich isch dr dario in da anda ako lamas haets au ka und ueb**all pf**d, ziegena und indios, echt schoen (luag foti) denn witt**kfahra und in a Kaktealanschaft ko voll und noch** int wuaschti.... ab** luagend fotina a dia beschriebens am besta. In Cafayate bin i denn imana sup** hostel klandet und han imana 4** zimm ...

... before we´d even begun ! We had a really interesting tour of the farm in Spanish, first meeting the adult & kid goats in the field, then visiting the milking sheds, and finally the rooms where the milk was pasteurised and then the cheese produced. We had a chance to taste a couple of their cheeses, which weren´t at all like the French "chevre" style cheeses that we loved, it had a ...

... we started to think that maybe we'd lucked out and the seats in front would be empty for the whole 8 hour journey...

Alas, at the very last minute two girls boarded and took the seats, practically shouting at each other in French as they did so.

They continued to talk to each other at a volume marginally below that of yelling for the next four hours. Which was nice. Thankfully we could stick our iPods in our ears to drown out their selfish racket.

Our ...