Nice place for a rest
Trip Start
Oct 23, 2006
1
103
228
Trip End
Apr 15, 2009
Salta,
Argentina
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Here we find fellow travellers: Karen and Coen from Holland, who have been on the road for 4 years in their LandCruiser, and Nicolas and Jessica from France in their shiney Landrover, on their first trip. William and Laurens from France were packpackers who decided to buy a motorbike in order to see more of the countries. They used the campground as a base for exploring.
Soon we had other neighbours from France, Belgium, Australia, Switzerland, Holland, and of course, Argentines (this is a camping country! Hoorah!!!)
Once settled in, we were immediately impressed by the great selection of cheese, and of course, the wines are really good here
Resting after the terrible washboard roads
. Malbecs are wonderful!Here is a city that has everything we needed.... after so long without complete selections of goods and foods, we're like kids in the proverbial candy shop.
We got to relax here. Eve didn't need any repairs, and minor projects were all we could find to do. Enjoying the company of our neighbours and discovering the town became our pastime.
We thoroughly enjoyed our time here: it felt like a holiday. So much so that we couldn't even get to update the blog. But here it is, better late than never!
The weather became steadily warmer, and the trees and flowers all began their transition to spring. Birds came, leaves came, and warmer weather was here for us all to soak up.
The pool doesn't get filled until December, and then it is emptied 3 months later. Maybe we'll see it full? We don't know yet.
Of course, the big tourbusses come here. Budget, Dragoman, Kumuka. They
pretty well keep to themselves, and we overlanders did our own thing.
Here we found a vet and got her certified as healthy for the chilean border crossing
The BIG pool
.During our time here, Diane's Mum had heart surgery, and this was a good place to be in touch with the outside world. She's now recovering nicely, thanks.
Here we also were exposed to the much different Argentinian way of eating..... Sometimes dinner starts at 9pm, but mostly much later, with desert around midnight. Even the kids are taught to stay up well after what we Norte's would think normal. But here we are, sometimes surrounded by singing kids at 1am. Well behaved though, and really not intrusive as far as we saw.
A group of dogs attatched themselves to us campers, and some became very attached to particular campers. And of course, visa-versa. One big old boy, Bones we called him, was quite close to starvation when we all arrived, but by the time we all left, he was not showing any ribs anymore.
Gillie enjoyed the company. She doesn't feel the need to dominate so regularly anymore, and so we think she has a better time with her encounters in dogland.
After 3 weeks here, it's already September 17th, it really felt strange leaving so many new friends, but it was time to head off to Chile. We had delayed this as much as possible, but now we had to rush over the border in 4 days. We have a date to meet our great friends from Canada who fly into Santiago on the 29th.
