Trip report on Salta and northwest Argentina

Posted on May 25, 2010 by jen

We just got back from a weeklong trip to Salta and northwest Argentina, and let’s just say that we’re very appreciative of all that Buenos Aires has to offer. We’ve heard that the rest of the country thinks porteños are snobby and that, in reverse, porteños think people from the provinces are unsophisticated and that Buenos Aires is far superior. Got to say, we’re starting to feel more like porteños every day . . . .

Our itinerary took us to see the top sights in northwest Argentina: Valle de Calchaquí, the wine-producing town of Cafayate, the salt flats of Salinas Grandes and the small village of Purmamarca (as well as the two biggest cities in the region, Salta and Jujuy). As you know from Ryan’s previous post, we made the mistake of using a local guide for the first two sights, then covered the rest on our own.

Salta

After our epic 20-hour journey on FlechaBus, we were very eager to arrive in Salta and check in to our hotel. We had heard that Salta is a beautiful and charming city, so we were excited to see it for ourselves. It has a wonderful central plaza surrounded by colonial buildings that are artfully lit at night. But we were somewhat surprised to find that the city is dirty, noisy and really polluted – Buenos Aires is a far bigger city, but the pollution was much worse in Salta.

Salta's main plaza is surrounded by lovely colonial buildings. They've got the lighting thing down for sure.

The Salta region is famous for its empanadas, and we ate them at least once (sometimes twice) every single day that we were there (to be fair, partly because they were good, and partly because there weren’t many other appetizing options). The best we had by far were at the Doña Salta restaurant just down the street from our hotel in Salta – yum!!

We love to eat empanadas as much as we love to play with them!

Valle de Calchaquí

The scenery on the drive to Cafayate through the Valle de Calchaquí is truly amazing – a beautiful landscape as far as the eye can see. Some parts were red, others dusty brown and even green. The colors kept changing around every turn.

These hills had just about every color you could imagine

The drive takes somewhere around 3 hours, depending on how often you stop. We stopped to explore the Garganta del Diablo (interestingly, we’ve identified at least 3 other places in Argentina with the same name, including the crazy 3-sided waterfall we saw at Iguazu) – a huge canyon in the red rocks right off the highway. Ryan climbed up a ways, and I graciously offered to stay below and take pictures (had nothing to do at all with my fear of heights).

Um, this is really high . . . not sure how I'm going to get down

Wine country of Cafayate

Once we arrived in Cafayate, we checked in to our hotel – the Patios de Cafayate (a Starwood luxury property) that used to be the estate of a winemaker’s family – the winery is still operating and is attached to the hotel. The property is absolutely beautiful, but they’re definitely missing the mark on some of the basics to make this hotel truly as spectacular as it could be (review of Patios coming soon).

We like pretty hotels

Cafayate is one of Argentina’s wine-producing regions, known for having fuller-bodied wines than those produced in Mendoza – one of our favorite everyday wines is from Cafayate (Quara malbec, 14 pesos/bottle – that’s around US$4). We tasted at two wineries in Cafayate chosen by our guide and were underwhelmed by both. Domingo Hermanos is located right in town and had a very basic tasting room pouring very mediocre wines (and only 2 of them!).

Wine by the gallon - got to be good

Finca de las Nubes is located just outside of town at the base of the hills. Their property is charming and has a great view, but their wines leave something to be desired. Impressively though, the entire winery is operated by just 5 employees – we saw them applying labels by hand while we were there.

Not a bad view from the winery, even though their wine sucks

Despite our disappointing tastings, we did discover a few great new malbecs while we were there – we haven’t seen these wines in Buenos Aires (though we didn’t know to look for them) so bought a few bottles to bring back with us just in case. Interestingly, we learned that the wines that are available in Buenos Aires are actually significantly more expensive in Cafayate (we saw our aforementioned-standby Quara priced at 25-30 pesos in the wine shops vs. 13 pesos in the big city). Wouldn’t you think they might be cheaper closer to the source, before all the shipping and logistics expenses? Clearly not.

Cafayate itself is a small town – the central plaza is quaint, surrounded by restaurants and shops. We ate at Colorado (owned by 2 Americans who relocated to Cafayate) and Terruno (located on the plaza, relatively good food). There are a handful of wineries/tasting rooms in town and a shop selling homemade alfahores – you can’t miss the massive sign from the main plaza. We bought an assortment to take back to our Spanish teachers in Buenos Aires for our ongoing debate over the best alfahores and conitos.

Alfahores and conitos from Cafayate image

Ok, so we bought more than a few, but it's for research!!

One other unique activity in Cafayate is to visit the goat cheese farm on the outskirts of town, where we met some of the producers. Our tour of the farm in Spanish was ok, but turns out our goat-farm vocabulary isn’t that great. Go figure.

Hello - I'm a goat and these are my friends

Renting a car

After heading back to Salta for one more night, ditching our guide and reserving a rental car, we were ready to hit the road and explore the region north of Salta. Neither of us had driven in foreign countries before (Canada and Mexico don’t count) and were a little nervous about renting a car and driving to the middle of nowhere. We were lucky to quickly find a car available through Alamo, who we’d read good reviews about. The employees we dealt with were all great – excellent English and very good customer service. It was a bit scary driving in Salta and trying not to get run over by buses, but once we made it out of the city we were good to go.

We hit Jujuy on our drive up to Purmamarca, our base for the next two nights. While some friends rave about the city of Jujuy, to us it just seemed like a biggish, mediocre city in the mountains. We stopped and had pizza for lunch at Chung-King (yep, that’s actually a pizza place, and no, they don’t serve Chinese food at all) and that was enough of Jujuy for us.

Purmamarca

Purmamarca is this cute little village up in the mountains. It’s one of the most popular places to overnight if you’re visiting the region north of Salta, partly because it’s developed a bunch of restaurants and hotels, and partly because it’s situated right at the base of this really pretty hill.

See, I told you it was a pretty hill

And our room on the top floor had a view of the hills (and a broken shower . . .)

Salinas Grandes

We’d read that the massive salt flats were not to be missed and also that they were best viewed toward the end of the day, after all the tour buses have left. So we cut short an intense game of chess in a café in Purmamarca and hit the road. And not just any road. It’s a 1-hour series of switchbacks straight up the side of the mountain to 12,000-ish feet. With tour buses and big trucks barreling down at us. Fun.

So after this lovely drive, we made it to the salt flats just as the sun was going down. Here’s our take on the famous Salinas Grandes: big, wide open space that’s white and crackly-looking. Kind of cool? Yes. Worth 2 hours of driving on scary mountain roads, the last bit in the dark? Maybe not. But we did take a few of the obligatory pics while we were there.

Hello from the really tall shadow people

Probably the most fun part was sneaking in to use the fee-for-use porta-potty after it was closed, then being confronted by a grumpy saltminer wanting her 1 peso on the way out. We were happy to pay, but it’s not our fault she didn’t have change for a 5!

You know this is going to be a classy bathroom with a sign like that

Humahuaca and Tilcara

These are two of the town that are regularly mentioned as destinations on any tour of the northwest. The drive to visit them was interesting, but if you’ve spent time in Northern California, Washington state or anywhere with mountains, I don’t think you’d be blown away. Maybe people get excited by the drive there? To us, it was ok, but not exactly a must-see.

It's a nice change from the city, but it's not exactly the most amazing landscape we've ever seen . . .

Maybe it was the towns themselves? We didn’t even stop in Humahuaca – just drove through and were ready to head back. It was interesting to see an Argentine pueblo, but there are plently of those that aren’t hours from anywhere. Tilcara was a little better. After walking for 10 minutes or so, we had pretty much seen the town so found a place to have lunch (empanadas – what else?) and a café, then headed back to our base in Purmamarca.

Heading home

On Sunday, it was time to make the trek from the small pueblo of Purmamarca in the hills all the way back to the big city of Buenos Aires. Our drive to the Salta airport took ~3 hours, leaving us with plenty of time before our flight. After our previously-posted experiences with FlechaBus and Aerolineas Argentinas, we were done taking chances on our transportation and booked a flight back with LAN. And what a good decision that was!!!!!

In comparison with our experience on Aerolineas Argentinas: LAN promptly checked us in (no waiting in line for 45 minutes because the computers were down and they were trying to come up with a back-up plan on the spot – see AA post). They made announcements in Spanish and English, didn’t combine our flight with another flight going to a different city, didn’t cancel all seat assignments, didn’t even land in another city that wasn’t on the itinerary (in case you’re wondering, yes, every one of these things happened when we flew with Aerolineas Argentinas to Iguazu). Instead, we boarded our flight on time and in an orderly fashion and actually pulled back from the gate 3 minutes EARLY. We landed in Buenos Aires, promptly received all of our checked luggage and were on our way home.

All in all, it was a fun trip and nice to experience a different part of the country. At the same time, it didn’t quite measure up to all the hype that we’d read and heard. It’s a great place to see if you’re in the area, but I wouldn’t call it a must-see international destination. Some of the landscapes are beautiful (valley on the way to Cafayate) and it was wonderful to visit a few villages that are on the other end of the spectrum from life in BA.

Buenos Aires, we missed you.

A little over 2 months in BsAs; some observations…

Posted on May 15, 2010 by ryan

So, we left our jobs on Feb 26th, got married on 3/4 and arrived here in Buenos Aires on 3/12. All in all we’ve been on this adventure for a little over 2 months now, so I thought it would be a good time to take a step back and make some observations…

…On Consulting

While at first it was weird to not be on-call all the time and we often woke up instinctively reaching for our Blackberries, we have now gone 2 full months without even carrying cell phones with us. It’s pretty awesome. You should try it.
Trying to explain what it was we used to do for work to locals down here gives a whole new sense of perspective on just how atypical our daily lives used to be–No one here can even imagine why anyone, anywhere would work the kind of hours we worked. From the outside of an MBA-type/consulting peer group, it seems at least 100x crazier than it did while we were doing it.
We witnessed some of our Spanish teachers get into a debate about which was the proper verb to use in a particular situation and comically remembered how we use to hang out with our friends and talk about work type stuff all the time–the exciting thing is that it took awhile to remember what kind of stuff we talked about (something about market sizes or profit modelling I think)
Down arrow: It is fair to say that we do not miss consulting at the moment.

…On Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is an unbelievably beautiful city and very easy to live in; we like it very much…
…though it’s not perfect: e.g., it would be nice if it was safer to walk around at night; it would be nice if the police were trustworthy; it would be nice if there were more diversified food options…
…but, all that said, for a large foreign city it is amazingly easy to feel integrated–it helps that we largely look similar to the locals–and has a fantastic energy and general friendly vibe to it. Also, it’s remarkably inexpensive all-in-all (especially for food, wine and rent)
In general, the people here seem very friendly and welcoming–though we were a bit naive in our hope to immediately have local friends; given our limited Spanish speaking abilities and the uncertainty in how long we’ll be here, I certainly wouldn’t want to be my friend.
As I said, we like it here. Some days we love it here, some days we’re less enthusiastic and eager to try out other Latin American cities for awhile, but we’ve consistently heard from folks that are more widely traveled down here that BsAs is THE place to be, so we’ll see.

…On Learning Spanish

Learning Spanish is hard.
Sometimes it is hard but fun and sometimes it is hard and very frustrating. Always, it is hard.
Every time you think you are getting a handle on it, there is some new concept/tense/structure/etc. that throws you for a loop and makes you lose confidence in everything you thought you knew
It’s much easier to understand than to speak
We’ve both made tremendous progress, but there is still a long road and lots of time/effort to achieve anything close to fluency
Or, maybe one day we’ll wake up and be able to speak perfectly. We’re hoping this happens.
One way or another, our goal is still to be able to make local friends and not be annoying to hang out with. Seems reasonable right?

…On the Spanish Language itself

I don’t understand why words need genders
I especially don’t understand why the words for Dresses and Bras are both masculine
I find it entertaining that the spanish word for wife is “esposa” and the word for handcuffs is “esposas”

…On what we’ll do next

A very difficult thing to figure out; we are going to explore Argentina a bit more (headed to Salta tomorrow on a 20 hour bus ride!) and in the very near future we need to decide whether or not to extend our lease here.
Also, need to figure out roughly how long this rehab is going to last. Should we go back in August? December? Should we get jobs down here and stay for awhile? Don’t know. Suggestions?

…Overall

It’s awesome to be here; if any of you reading this are even mildly contemplating doing something like this, stop contemplating and just do it–it’s hard to imagine a more rewarding experience.

How to rent an apartment in Buenos Aires

Posted on March 25, 2010 by ryan

We finally found a great new short-term apartment here in Buenos Aires. Finding the right short-term rental is far more complex than you might think, so read on for our reviews of all the agencies we worked with and a very important list of tips/tricks to make sure you get a good place and don’t get taken.

Yesterday we finally agreed on a new apartment. Even though we didn’t decide until 3:30pm yesterday, the gang at ApartmentsBA were able to let us move in at 5:20pm which was pretty awesome. The apartment isn’t perfect–it could use some more light and we wish we had a patio and a dining table–but it is huge, has a great kitchen is in a perfect location in the heart of Recoleta and perhaps most importantly, it has a king sized bed! Most of the beds down here are tiny double beds and while Jen and I like each other, it hasn’t been so much fun waking up every time the other person moves for the last 2 weeks 🙂 Pictures of our new place down below.

Before the pictures of our new place, we thought we’d give a little bit of an overview of the process we went through to find this place and some brief reviews of the agencies we worked with and some general tips/tricks.

Continue reading →

Random observations on Buenos Aires

Posted on March 22, 2010 by jen

Some early observations from our experience so far in Buenos Aires – to be added to periodically:

They love their dogs. We’ve never seen a major city with so many dogs (as pets, not strays), especially so many big dogs. Seems that the favorite breeds here are golden retrievers, boxers, labs. There are some small dogs, but not nearly as many as in San Francisco (thankfully). They’re all exceptionally well-behaved – many aren’t even on leashes and just trot along right next to their owners. They don’t chase after other dogs or even seem to have interest in people other than their owners (for example, me – who wants to pet every single one of them). Very impressive obedience training. And the dog walkers are all power-walkers with 8-10 dogs on average.
A consequence of the plethora of dogs is the “dogpiles” on the sidewalks – everywhere. Apparently it’s not a norm to pick up after your dog . . .
Everything starts late here. Tonight (Sunday) we went out to grab a quick dinner and get to bed early before getting up at an ungodly hour (read: before 11am) to start Spanish classes tomorrow. The Mexican restaurant we wanted to go to was empty when we walked by – we thought maybe they were closing, until we overheard them telling another couple that they didn’t open for another half hour. At 8:30 on Sunday night. Wow.
There’s graffiti everywhere. Everywhere. On the sides of buildings in our (quite upscale) neighborhood. On the walls of the cafe where we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast the other day. On the bases of statues in the city parks. They’ve had to fence in some of important monuments and statues to prevent them from being graffitied.
Perhaps offsetting the last observation, there are trees everywhere. We are currently living in Palermo Soho, right near a number of the city’s parks, which are all wonderfully green. But even walking around exploring different neighborhoods and wandering down random streets, they’re all lined with trees (see our pics).
Most of the aforementioned city parks are fenced in. For example, the park that was the site of the attempted purse snatching is completely fenced in, with only two entrances/exits. Seems like that might make it less than ideal for an illegal grab-and-run operation . . . We’ve come across one park so far that’s not surrounded by a fence – beautiful Las Heras Park. Haven’t yet figured out what necessitates the fences at all the other parks – let us know if you have insights here.
Cheap wine can be good wine. We ordered a half bottle of Malbec at dinner tonight and paid ~$4 . . . at a restaurant . . . and it was good. Seriously. Given the amount of wine we drink, we may well save a few hundred dollars a month on wine alone vs. what we would be paying at home!

Week 1 in Buenos Aires

Posted on March 19, 2010 by ryan

We’ve officially been Argentinian for a full week now! Soon, we won’t even remember how to speak english.

We’ve been bad about updating the blog, mainly because we’ve been mostly out exploring, and then the little time we do spend online has been prioritized for one or more of the following:

-Researching spanish school: We start on Monday at Vamos Spanish

-Looking for a longer term apartment: There are roughly a bazillion apartment rental companies and it is a bit overwhelming to sort through all of the options–I think we spent 8+ hours researching yesterday alone. We are going to visit our first couple of apartments this afternoon, so we’ll see…

-Trying to figure out where to eat: We had some good and some very bad luck with walking into random restaurants on the street. I think we don’t yet know how to recognize a place that sucks, so we’ve been reading more reviews lately.

–Using Google Translate: To prepare ourselves to go out and do things like drop of laundry: “Para lavar y sacar. debemos regresar manana a las 11?”

-Using our spanish learning software Fluenz: Expensive, but really good!

-Trying to figure out what futuristic Argentine technology makes this possible:

Anyway, we promise to post more regularly and do more than just bullet point summaries (especially once we have a more comfortable apartment), but for now here are some pics from our first week: Buenos Aires Week 1 pics

Ciao!

Quick catch-up on first few days in Buenos Aires

Posted on March 15, 2010 by ryan

We have been lax in posting over the last couple of days, and we don’t have much time now, but we thought we should do a quick summary of some highlights of our first couple of days here in Buenos Aires (with more details to come later):

-Our apartment is just ok, but it is in a cool neighborhood

-Jen found a cockroach in the bathroom; this is worrisome.

-There was a failed attempt by 3 hoodlums to steal Jen’s purse in the park yesterday–we will definitely write more about this as it was quite comical

-We went on a cool free walking tour and saw Retiro and Recoleta; we also learned that if you have private health insurance here (~$120/month) you get one free plastic surgery each year. Our guide pointed out all of the artificially enhanced locals along the tour.

-It seems that Argentinians walk very quickly as we frequently get passed on the street which didn’t happen back in SF–though, this could be because Jen is always gawking at a building

-We have had some very good food and some VERY bad food so far–walking into random places off the street has not gone well for us; we will seek out recommendations going forward

-The wine is good

-Tomorrow we start spanish school and have to be across town by 8:30am–this will be very hard seeing as though we have not yet woken up before noon.

-We don’t have to go to work tomorrow, do you 🙂

More to come, and pictures!

Consulting Rehab

The first step is admitting you have a problem… (then take a break and travel!)

Tag Archives: travel tips