Day 10: August 24, 2007 In Salta-Tuity's Return
Trip Start
Aug 15, 2007
1
10
202
Trip End
Mar 01, 2008
Salta,
Argentina
Friday, August 24, 2007
It has become my routine to get up and write the previous day's entry and expenses. Elena slept in so I went down to the office. Just as I finished my email correspondence, Tuity came in. I hadn't seen him since 2000. He looks a little older but his vitality was shining through even though he was dead tired from driving 15 hours from La Plata to Salta. Like me, he prefers to get long road trips over with in one shot rather than spending the money and time in a hotel room. We agreed to meet and discuss research plans at 5:00. He had much to attend to during the day.
I returned to the apartment a little before 2:00 and picked up Elena to go downtown for lunch. As we waited for a cab, Tuity drove out on his way home for lunch. He stopped and jumped out, astonished at the señorita that Elena has become. He last saw her when she was 3 years old. He insisted on driving us into town, so off we went.
Elena had spotted a restaurant called El Cardon attached to the Hotel Salta so we tried it out, both of us having a delicious hamburger. The bill came to a bit more than I was expecting because we didn't share the meal. We walked a couple of blocks to the locutorio de internet on Alvarado that we used when we first arrived in Salta. We spent an hour before realizing that we had to get back to the office for my meeting with Tuity. We got a cab just outside and were back in Grand Bourg in 10 minutes.
My meeting with Tuity went very well. We are both on the same page with regard to the direction in which we think the program should go. We decided that we should sample in the Río La Viña or the neighboring stream in the southern part of the Valle de Lerma and the base of the Neogene section in the Valle Calchaquí. Both of these areas have ready access to water for cooling the drill bits. Three other areas can be kept in reserve and attempted if time permits. All of these have either real or potential water problems. The Valle de Lerma results may yield enough information so that the other areas won't ever need to be done. These sections should give us a west to east temporal profile of the uplift history of the Andes when combined with our previously sampled sections at Angastaco, Río Piedras, and Río González. That should provide us with an excellent comparison with the transect we completed in the Sierras Subandinas to the north. We also agreed to try to write a short paper on the study we did at Río León in the Sierra de Aguaragüe. As we talked, I noticed a growing grass fire across the street. He called it in to 110 but it started raining and the fire went out.
Toyo loaded a couple of my files onto the system so I returned to a computer and worked with them. While I sat there, Tuity's wife, Estela, came in and gave me a big hug. We hadn't seen each other since 1996. She was very excited to have Elena in town but didn't have time to meet her right then.
Toyo said good-bye for the weekend. He returns to his family in Jujuy every Friday, returning each Monday. When the new highway is finally completed, it will only be a 27 km trip so he may finally get to change his routine.
I went up to the apartment at about 8:00. Neither Elena nor I were hungry so we watch soccer and the news until 9:30 and then went out to the restaurant next door. We had an excellent meal of pastas and meat. I realized that the waiter the first night had taken us for a ride. This night's waiter was much better and was duly rewarded with a good tip.
We returned to the apartment at about 11:00. Bernardo and had our nightcap on the balcony, watching a fireworks display in the distance. After he turned in, Elena and I started to watch a movie but I fell asleep. When I awoke, the movie was over so I went to bed.
