Salta
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2007
1
23
38
Trip End
Feb 24, 2008
Salta,
Argentina
Friday, December 7, 2007
I did one big tour from Salta, which was meant to follow the path of the Tren a las Nubes. The Train to the Clouds was a tourist train that was shut down in 2005 after the train got stuck on a bridge for about 7 hours. Apparently some people had to be rescued by helicopter and the company's license was taken away. But I hear that starting in March 2008, a different company will be running trains on that route. Anyway, now there are buses and jeeps that take a similar path (not exactly the same, but you're most of the time within view of the train tracks). So I did one of these, a full-day tour
01 - Cathedral at Plaza 9 de Julio
.It was just me, the guide and an elderly Canadian couple. The scenery gets fairly nice as soon as you leave Salta and we drove past a bunch of tobacco fields, tobacco being a major crop around here (the Lerma Valley). We continued through the Quebrada de Toro which was actually fairly green, the sides of the gorge being covered with vegetation. Eventually, as the day went on, the landscape would change to being much more desert-like and along the way we saw a ton of cacti. Some cacti forests even. We stopped at Puente del Toro, which is the longest (260 meters) bridge along this train route and were able to walk along that.
Eventually we made it to a mountain pass at 4,080 meters above sea level and then made our way down to the town of San Antonio de los Cobres. From there we continued to Viaducto La Polvorilla, a bridge that is considered quite an amazing engineering feat. The bridge itself is 224 meters long and 64 meters high and, impressively, curved. It is also at an altitude of 4,200 meters (nearly 14,000 feet). Our guide said that this Tren a las Nubes route is the third-highest train in the world after one in Peru and one in China. We then went back to San Antonio, had lunch and made our way back to Salta, stopping once in a while. For instance, we stopped at a pucará (pre-Hispanic fortress) called Tastil. It was from the early 14th century, before the Incas made it to Argentina, and was re-discovered (1901) by the same guy who rediscovered the pucará I visited in Tilcara.
In Salta itself, I walked around and also I took a gondola ride up to San Bernando hill, where you have panaramoic views of the whole city of Salta. It's a good place to hang out for a bit and it's also a nice walk down back to the city. There were lots of people jogging up and down the path to the top hill (going up seemed tough).
I'm heading to Cafayate early tomorrow morning. I'm going with a tour van because the road to Cafayate from Salta is supposedly really nice, so there are lots of tours from Salta that go to Cafayate and then return. I'm just going to do the first half and not return. I had hoped to pass through a town called Cachi en route but that turned out to be really difficult -- so if I want to go there, I'll have to make a separate trip out of it.
