Northwest Argentina part 1

I’ve been really looking forward to this leg of the trip ever since I saw pictures in the blogs I used to plan our itinerary. It’s even better than I expected; the landscapes are jaw-dropping, like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and I’m going to run out of superlatives very quickly here!

Serrania de Hornocal - ridiculously stunning!

We start in the city of Salta, which has a couple of pleasant plazas, some nicely painted churches and a place that does awesome garlic chicken sandwiches! We use this time to try and establish a slightly slower pace, shifting from being out and about most of most days to having more down time each day.

Lovely buildings (and skies) on Salta’s main square

An evening of meat and folk dancing

Views of Salta city

A few days in, we take the first of several epic drives, this one a few hours north up and over a 4,170m peak to the Salinas Grandes, the 4th largest salt flats in South America. Salta city is set to the side of a large floodplain between several mountain ranges. The valley begins to narrow as we drive north and we start becoming acquainted with the cardón cactus that live at this higher altitude. It’s funny to look back now at how much effort we went to to get up close to one of the first we saw, scrambling up inhospitable slopes. A few kilometres on we realise just how many there are and we see plenty during our 11 days here! They never fail to impress though, especially when the light hits their uppermost spikes, giving them a little halo.

We will see many more of these on our trip

The landscapes on the way to the salt flats are stunning, the slow road up providing lots of opportunities to appreciate the views…

The salt flats finally emerge on the horizon and we make our way over. It’s crazy windy and Sim gets stung by thousands of tiny salt pieces at one point. A tour guide leads us out onto the flats driving her motorbike and we follow in our car. Luckily there’s a couple of Spanish guys also driving their own car out and they translate for us. The patterns of the salt on the surface and in the pools are stark and beautiful. Back in the car park, there are salt statues, buildings made of salt bricks and salt covering the picnic tables and chairs.

Salt flats emerging like a mirage

Salt encrusted tables and chairs

Buildings made of salt bricks

The tour guide invites us to do some fun poses - we try but in our defence it’s awfully windy!

Then we’re back down to the sweet town of Purmamarca for the night where there is a hill called Cerro de los Siete Colores (hill of 7 colours) made up of several different types of rocks formed during different time periods all layered on and around each other to create a lovely patchwork. You’ve got pinks (red clay, mud and sand), whites (limestone), browns and purples (lead, calcium carbonate), earthy browns (fanglomerate composed of rock with manganese), reds (clay stones, iron), greens (phyllites and slates of copper oxide) and yellows (sandstones with sulphur).

Next day, we drive further north to our next stop of Humahuaca, which is a nice little town with another sweet town square and a massive great big monument overlooking everything.

The biggest draw card here is the Serrania de Hornocal, a larger version of the multi-coloured hill in Purmamarca. Sitting at 4,761m, this one is unbelievably stunning. We walk down a steep hill from the parking area to some viewing points that bring you closer to the marvel. Aelie and I can visualise the rainbow serpent creating this one, leaving its colour across the landscape. Some of the features even look like the scaled back of a reptilian creature. Mind-blowing!

The drive back down to Humahuaca

The walk back up is quite a puff at that altitude. I have to calm a slight panic as I work to regain my breath (I think growing up with asthma has always made me feel a bit vulnerable to any sense of breathlessness). Another major impact of walking at that altitude is crazy dehydration. In combination, it’s an awkward experience of huffing and puffing and drinking water then struggling to regain the breath you lost while you were taking a drink 😝 I walked the last, steepest bit backwards so I could distract myself with gazing out at the glorious mountains rather than up the torturous slope back to the car park.

Our final day in town, we do a hike to some caves with rock art, including some from 9,000 years ago! It’s a hot slog up a riverbed that takes a lot longer than we anticipated. We’re underprepared with food but we manage and are rewarded with a beautiful red rock formation, carved by water and some entrancing ochre paintings that remind us so many have been here before. The graffiti alongside the pictographs is a bit of a downer, sadly.

The walk takes us under that bridge and up the valley behind it

This is also the day of the Argentinian elections. There’s much tooting of horns when Milei’s win is announced. I sleep poorly that night, worried for Argentina. It’s no doubt the current government have failed to make improvements to the decades of dysfunction and economic turmoil, but Milei seems focused more on libertarian dreams than policies that will actually improve people’s everyday lives. We don’t have a huge degree of experience with day to day life here, but we do see the dreadful state of roads and infrastructure, many incomplete and poorly constructed buildings, the lines of Argentinians every day exchanging their pesos for USD and the ridiculous situation of multiple exchange rates.

Next stop: our travels continue in northwest Argentina as we head back to Salta city and follow the road south to Cafayate