Villa Vicuna Cafayate

... the ranch it was time to say yeeehaw and be off on our merry via. Well not so merry if you include an overnight bus again. We headed up north this time to one of my favourite all time places Cafayte. This is real Argentina!! A sleepy little town, with lots of cafes on the sunny square plaza with a back drop of the Andes! Stunning!! We stayed in a gorgeous hostel called Rusty K that someone else told us about. We ended up staying a week it was so lovely ...

... they promised. And sure enough, they agreed to pay it! We had to wait til the next day however for the mechanic to buy and then fit the new battery. This didnt really affect us as we didnt need the car til the next afternoon but we made a mental note to kick off about it when it came to paying for the car!!

The next day we went on the tour of the wineries - 10.30am was a bit early to be tasting wine but the tour was free so what the hell! We went to 3 ...

... We´ve also discovered some wine in a box. I know I know I know.. winemakers drinking wine in a box?¿? However.. in Argentina it´s 3 pesos (1 dollar) and it´s effin tasty. Not a fine wine but a tasty more than drinkable wine that gets me ****** for cheap. haha. It´s our new favorite bev. So last night we gather a few boxes of wine and some beers and ...

... What colour is that? Reck? Not quite I think you mean Red" and I'm hurtling towards the lifetime quota at an alarming rate. Still the children provide ample ent**tainment and I have to commend them for beginning to tackle english (howev** basic it is) as young as 6. It is quite a feat when one consid**s that students in England don't begin to study a foreign language until secondary school. For a country as multicultural and div**se as England is this is a shocking fact.


Cafayate, Northern Argentina, Argentina danm1986

Aprés l'animation d'une grosse ville comme Cordoba, me voilà à Cafayate, petite bourgade tranquille dans le Nord-Ouest argentin. Cette ville est surtout connue pour son vin blanc, du Torrontes, qui est en effet excellent, après dégustation dans un vignoble local. La ville est très tranquille et typique d'un climat très chaud (et dans ce cas-ci, sec): en début d'après-midi, de 1H à 4H, toute la ville est endormie ...

... Well, i bought a bottle of Malbec that we really good, but was disappointed with the bodega part of the trip, anyway. But the scereny was top-notch. reminded me a little of the south west of The States, but with bigger mountains and more spectacular scenery overall. I had such a great time with the all-Argentine group we went with, and feel that this was the perfect place to say goodbye to Argentina. Bolivia, here we come!

... to Cafayate and found some very nice and cheap digs at a little hospedaje run by an ex-school teacher with some pretty fancy hair. To get to our room we followed a path under the grape vines to the back of the yard where we had our own little terrace with table and chairs, shaded by an apricot tree in full fruit. Nice. We had some cold beer on the terrace with another guest, the well-travelled Helga from Austria, and eventually dragged ourselves ...

... the devil´s throat !). The shapes of the rock formations & perhaps even more impressively the different colours are magnificent and quite unlike anything I´ve seen on this trip or anywhere else. The colours are caused by different minerals and geological/chemical processes such as oxidisation which meant you can see brown , grey , green , yellow ... in some places an impressive "sandwich" of all these different colours. Hope the numerous photos do ...

... to sell us one already chilled, and they even uncorked it for us, nice one ;) With our picnic complete, we whizzed over the road to buy some tres chic plastic cups with which to enjoy the wine, and started to think about where to enjoy our lunch. Katie had noticed that the vineyard had left a gate open to the fields of vines, so we agreed to chance our luck and see if we were able to find a ...

... ended up getting off about an hour from Cafayate, so at least I had some rest-bite and a chance to have only an absurd lack of leg room rather than an absolutely ridiculous one.

The scenery was really nice, we've been spoilt by the end of our Bolivian experience and now expect all scenery to be ever-changing and spectacular, but it couldn't quite match up to those lofty expectations!

As you get closer to Cafayate you wind through a very scenic mountain range which ...