Posada de la Pena Tilcara

... stall! We then headed back home and had a look around little Purmamarca, which is only 5 blocks by 5 blocks and made up entirely of restaurants, souvenir boutiques, grocery shops and hostels.<br><br>We retreated back to our hostel to find the same musicians from the night before rocking the night away. After we had a gander around some souvenir shops in Purmamarca, we got ourselves an early night in preparation for the long day ahead. <br>

... 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 ...

... been playing with the dogs that live on the property, giving them all rhyming names of course, and he has enjoyed being in one spot for a while. Blair is trying to shake a bout of bad belly, so Patrick and I went out on a date together last night, we had a nice dinner in a local restaurant with live Andean music - he just loves the panpipes. We are set to head to the border tomorrow and spend two days there getting used to ...

As we wanted to be free to discover the country at our rhythm, we rent a car. At first very strange as the last people who rent it destroy all the protection of the engine giving a very loud sound at each acceleration. We start with our super car to take the road to go Jujuy which is a very small road in the mountain with a lot of turn (perfect to test if the car could go ...

Nestled in amongst the Quebrada de Humahuaca valley, arriving in Tilcara felt like landing something in between a cowboys and indians filmset and a classic South American colonial township, where the higher presence of indigenous Quechuan´s was definitely noticeable. However, there´s alot of Buenos Aireans, or other large city dwellers that have come here as well to take advantage of Tilcara´s prominent artistic scene, to set up a restaurant or craft shop`in ...

... along side huge cactus plants. All was well until the guide gave us the chance to make the horses run, and I almost fell off.. yikes! The rest went just fine. That night was a huge Good Friday celebration. All the tourists and people went to mass and the place was jam packed full of people. After they took the effigy of Christ off the cross and put him into a glass casket, they carried the casket, a figure of Mary, a figure of some saint, and the cross all over town in ...

... afterwards walked on the actual tracks across a bridge over the frequently flooding river. With daybreak unveiling the scenery, you realise how Burren-like the place is barring the cacti. We travelled about 50 odd Km with the terrain becoming more mountainous & colourful before we saw anything that resembled a house but strangely you would pass a bus shelter periodically. However that was all to change when we came upon the colossal sized village of Santa Rosa de Tastil jam ...

... the names Belgrano, Lavalle, Tucuman, Rivadavia and San Martin, at the very least. 6. A big cross on the closest, smallest hill overlooking the town. Whoever coined the phrase, "It's as much about teh journey as the destination", clearly had the village of Iruya and the Salinas Grande in mind. Both places take an age to get to, particularly Iruya (70km in 3.5 hours...), winding along thin, bumpy gravel roads that snake up and down and around ...

... desert and semi-fredo 'Bariloche' to finish). Other than eating too much and watching too much television in our lovely room, we found time to visit the Pucara (or fortress) on the hillside overlooking the town. Better reconstructed than the ruins at Tastil they were - for all that - somehow less atmospheric, particularly the seemingly self-aggrandising and otherwise incongruous monument to the archaeologists involved in restoring the ruins perched ...