Hotel Viento Norte Tilcara

... out a mark. The older guy on the bench with them jumped up and approached me with a flyer asking if I needed accomodation. Of course my reaction was to tell hime no and keep walking. I popped into a open door, adjusted my money belt and looked at the map on the back of the flyer. I had a hostel in mind from the Lonely Planet and set off, as I seem to always do, in the wrong the direction.* After wandering for a few minutes I realized my error,but then found ...

... we went along with our shorts looking forward to a swim after our long hike. When we got there, the waterfall fell into a pool about the size of a bathroom sink. Never in the last thousand years could you swim there. Unless the antecedents of the people who lived in those huts decreased in size exponentially. More up to date update From here we went on to Bolivia ...

... 4000m above sea level. We will cross into Bolivia on Wednesday and take a train to Uyuni in the Altiplano. I´m not too sure about chewing coca leaves for the altitude but I´ll try anything once I suppose. It will be hard to leave here, but we are so relaxed and rejuvenated after spending four days doing virtually nothing that we ready to take on the next phase of the adventure .... the largest and highest salt flat in the world!

... life out of the place in order to pull in the tourists. And pull them in they do, in droves. It´s picturesque, the surrounding mountains are beautiful, but everywhere you go, you´re surrounded by teenagers (even more bored with it than you are) hawking the same ¨handmade¨ mass-produced trinkets you´ve been seeing for three countries, all while ...

... We then discovered that pretty much everything to see and do in the town was within two blocks, so we covered our sightseeing in the first couple of hours (it´s hard to imagine this township has a population of approx 5600!) Pero! (but!)... there was some amazing scenery to be taken in - the extraordinary colours of the surrounding hillsides and the enormous cactus trees that covered them. We took a visit to the pre-hispanic fortress El Pucara, just outside ...

... together in their tiny rock houses. That night Emily and I decided to make stir fry for our group. It was really fun cooking in the hostel, and the food turned out great. We all sat at the table and it was really pleasant; a great feeling of community between us all. This was more our Easter dinner than anything. Sunday the 23rd- We took a bumpy bus to a different town nearby called Purmamarca. This place was smaller than Tilcara, but had some pretty things to offer ...

... s recorrimos el cerro 7 colores, y dimos la vuelta al pueblo. Increíble, despues de ver kilometros de suelo blanco con montañas al horizonte, ahora vemos cerros llenos de colores en medio de casas de colores tierras. De nuevo volvimos a Tilcara para dormir y nos queda mañana por recorrer y ya por la tarde nos vamos a Salta. Se nos termina la Semana Santa y las vacaciones.

... by purples, reds, oranges, yellows, blues, whites and pinks. Brilliant. I hit a few towns in the area during my brief visit. Towns the likes of Humahuaca, Tilcara, Pumamarca and Maimara. All these pretty and charming villages are small, 2000-6000 people, within a half hour bus ride of each other, and all remarkably similar in design. It's almost as if the pioneers of this region set a criteria for the building of a town. If they did, it would ...

... as we head towards the border... Particularly as our first planned stop across the border is Tupiza, a small town which - I have it on good authority - is surrounded by rocks and dust... Well, writing this now - as I am - from Potosi, Bolivia, I think I can say that rumours of our early return are somewhat exaggerated. Fingers crossed - things are going pretty well and if it stays this way we won't be changing our flights just yet. (T)

Back to Iruya, there was much more activity than in the morning. I assisted to the friday school release for the primary school kids: a speech by the director, telling them to be good and do their homework cause otherwise they'd get double and that'd be stupid, hey? They were all standing in ranks in the yard, and then they were dismissed and the loudspeakers were playing a song with patriotic intonations. The kids swarmed in the streets of ...