Not every day goes as planned

This inviting blue door in the photo opens to one of the nicest hostels I have ever stayed at, the Casa Arbol (“Tree House”) in Cafayate, another station on the way north. It is a small hostel, run by a woman from Malta and her Argentinian husband, very neat, with a small courtyard surrounded by the few high-ceilinged rooms, and a large, cozy outside sitting area. The first, small part of it is covered by a grape arbour loaded with not-yet ripe green grapes. 

The grey windows belong to our room

Cafayate, well known for its wines and situated in the second most important wine growing area of Argentina (right after Mendoza) is a town of maybe 10,000, quiet, its pace relaxed, with many great places to stay and to eat. We came back from another great meal of bife de chorizo, the wonderful Argentinean beef, accompanied, of course, by a bottle of 'Quara' Malbec, again from a local winery, a little over an hour ago. 
 
Tomorrow morning at 8:30 we will be picked up by Walter, a local tour guide, for an excursion the Quebrada de las Conchas, one of the highlights of this area. We can leave our backpack here at the hostel until we return sometime in the early afternoon even though we won't stay here another night (though it's very tempting!): later tomorrow afternoon we hope to catch the bus to Salta, about 3 1/2 hours away.
Today, obviously, was a day when things went more ore less according to plan, which cannot quite be said for yesterday.




Times here are always flexible, and the bus that was supposed to leave Tafí at 12:30 finally left the terminal at 1:05. We passed through a spectacular landscape, climbing higher and higher into country dominated by saguaro-like cacti that looked as if they were standing watch on the hillsides otherwise pretty bare of vegetation. Deep valleys and dry hills stretching far into the distance, dramatic drops right beside me (oh, how I love that extra thrill of having a window seat with a perfect view of an abyss!) and stone walls to hold small herds of sheep, rarely cows, during the night, small dwellings with solar panels to generate power in those remote areas - no way I'd fall asleep this time, especially since the 'cardones' (cacti) were just starting to bloom. It was a double decker bus, but the bus stopped to take on a load of school children at a school in the middle of nowhere, then every five minutes at a driveway or beside a small house to disperse them again. 

We arrived in Amaicha around 2:30 - and I felt as if I'd just been shoved into an oven! 

We found the Amancay hostel I had read about on the internet without trouble, about fifteen or twenty minutes from the bus station, four and a half blocks from the plaza (I almost wrote 'main plaza', but I'm sure there is only one). The gate was closed, but not locked, and we walked up to the door. Repeated knocking didn't net any reaction from inside: could anyone sleep that deeply even if it was siesta time? We ate our lunch at a small table outside, knocked from time to time, waited ... After half an hour we decided to walk back into town and see if we could find out anything from the tourist office, possibly even find another place to stay. We had seen a few on the way, but I had so set my heart on this one after reading about it on the internet that I didn't really want to - not that anything was open for business. The whole town was asleep, except for a few men playing cards at the edge of the plaza in the shade. 
What to do, then? Ruefully we walked back along the dusty road to 'Amancay' - but still not a soul around. Again we sat and waited, and finally a pickup truck stopped outside the gate, and a man came in. He turned out to be a friend of the owner's, had seen us sitting there and proceeded to invite us in, show us the room we could rent, and tell us to feel right at home - all in a terribly fast Spanish with many dropped syllables and lots of 'soft gggs' , the hard to understand Argentinean lingo.

It took until almost eight before Sebastian, the owner, returned from his trip to Tucumán. To our disappointment he didn't speak a word of English, which made a trip to the Quilmes ruins with him (he's the main, or maybe the only tour operator here in town and supposed to be very knowledgeable, not only about the ruins but also about the history and story of the local natives of whom he is one) a futile undertaking. 

Last night we decided that it made little sense to go there for us after all, because it's kind of complicated: we'd take the bus from Amaicha, which would drop us off on the road half an hour later, then we'd walk (in the heat, likely without shade) for five or six kilometres, walk around the ruins, possibly again without any English information, walk back to the road (unless someone driving by gave us a ride), take the bus back to Amaicha about three hours after we were dropped off (likely again only very approximate times), take the bus to Cafayate at six, arrive around eight, find a hostel ...  It sounded like a rather forbidding task. 

Sebastian had suggested a restaurant not geared towards tourists with regional food, and around 8:30 we walked back into town, followed by his dog who turned out to get into scraps with each of the twenty or thirty dogs along the way, hiding behind us after incurring their wrath. At one time three other dogs attacked him at once, and I couldn't escape the melee fast enough and received a nip in the heel. It drew blood and hurt for a while, but now, a day later, it looks fine, and there is no sign of infection. Thankfully my tetanus vacination is up to date, and the dog didn't look as if it had rabies. To top it off, we found a 'Cerrado' sign on the door of the restaurant, and none other open either: it was still too early, I guess. Ruefully we picked up a bottle of Malbec at a supermarket, some bread at a panaderia, and walked back to the hostel.

But if all of that sounds like kind of a lost day - it wasn't. Sitting outside with bread and great cheese from the dairy we visited the day before, a place that had been founded by Jesuits in 1779 and produced cheese ever since, drinking wine, the almost full moon up above, a few timid stars showing between shreds of cloud, I felt very much at peace with the world.

The cathedral 'Nuestra Senora del Rosario' in Cafayate at sunset