Salta, Cafayate & Tucumán

Before I start, in case anyone had noticed - and I know there are some Spanish speakers amongst you - I have only just worked out (well, I asked Andrew) how to get accents on letters. Will try to get it right from now on...

We are now in a city called Tucumán, and 5 hours into the 13 hour gap between arriving here from Cafayate and getting on our overnight bus to Córdoba. We leave at the highly uncivilised hour of 1.30am, but decided to keep moving rather than spend more time here as it not an especially inspiring city and is also stuffily hot. However, it has been worth stopping here as I have just had the excitement of wandering round the biggest supermarket we've seen in South America so far. I love supermarkets in other countries, which stems I think from going to massive French hypermarkets whilst on holiday as a child. Even more exciting is that I have just bought a Spanish version of a book from the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. When I was 7 I performed in a play called Redwall which was later turned into a bestselling children's book, and a series of other books followed. They have been massively successful worldwide, but it was still slightly odd to stumble across one on Argentina and of course I just had to buy it!

Anyway, enough of me acting like a small child, back a few days for an update on what we've been up to. To be honest we didn't really do much in Salta, but we did really enjoy our relaxing time there. It is an attractive city to be in despite being very busy and we enjoyed some good food and wine, including Andrew's first steak of what will no doubt be very many (Ryan - we will see what we can do re your typically random request for steak photos!) On a more negative note, the hostel we were staying in was not great, especially as I ended up with flea bites from the resident dog. As per usual I reacted badly to them and although much better now, it was more than a little annoying.

This was an example of a hostel raved about in our Lonely Planet guide being not very good, and we are finding that if at all possible getting tips from other travellers is the way forward; the book is a good few years out of date and so things can change quite significantly. Reviews are also inevitably subjective, and some of the places highlighted as must see are not always great in our view. Of course the people you are with can also make a huge difference, and fortunately we have generally been very lucky in that, especially over the past few weeks. And in case anyone was wondering we're still quite happy spending time together too!

As you have probably realised, we are taking a bit more time working our way through Argentina, so we're stopping off at some of the smaller places along the way rather than just hitting one city after another. After a bit of research we decided to make an early start on Sunday to head 4 hours South to the town of Cafayate, which is in the middle of a big wine region. It is famous for Torrontés white but there are also some more than decent reds. We thought that a combination of wine tours and exploring some of the nearby apparently stunning rock formations would be a reasonable combination. We weren't disappointed, especially as this time we were in a really good hostel where a tour of a couple of local wineries was included in the 3 pounds each per night B&B cost!

We were also able to get on a 5 hour tour of the Quebrada de Cafayate on Sunday afternoon, which we really enjoyed. As you'll see from the photos the area is impressive, and also it was good to do a bit more active (albeit gentle active) stuff again. No, we're not going all sporty on you - far from it - but there is a danger of wine and delicious food taking us over so we are tryng to keep a balance, honest. We definitely tipped in favour of the wine yesterday though, after our wine and cheese tasting tour starting at the rather dangerous hour of 10.30am - not a bad way to spend a Monday morning!

It was really interesting to find out more about how the wine is produced, and even more interesting to find that you could buy an extremely good quality Merlot for about 3 pounds. We had a really good day and met some really interesting people sitting out on the sunny terrace in the hostel, but needless to say getting up for a 6am bus this morning was not much fun. We're glad we did haul ourselves out of bed though, as we're looking forward to seeing a few more places over the next few days before reaching Buenos Aires in time for the weekend.