After leaving San Pedro de Atacama and crossing the frontier to Argentina (no comment about the 3 hours of “siesta” on the border station), we headed once again to Salta, the city where I spent a few days around Christmas. As I had already seen a few sites there (mainly canyons), we decided to do only one excursion and went to Cachi, a small and lovely village in the Andes. For the first time since ages, we did some jogging and especially at the beginning it felt horrible! The town is not as spectacular as the previous places we had been to, but it was a nice and relaxed day, with delicious Argentine empanadas and ice cream. For Esteffen three other Argentine specialties were of interest: the daily bank run in the morning (you should start worrying if there is NO huge queue in front of every bank), the obligation to pay everything in cash (e.g. the “rapipagos” where you can clear off your monthly rent, electricity and internet bills), and the fact that there is almost never “cambio”: if you pay with 100 AR$ (more or less 12 €) it is not possible to give you the remaining change of converted 1.50 € without going to a bank – which can last! As an economist seeing a non-working system was very motivating to him ….

Next we had a looong but comfortable night and day bus ride to Mendoza, where we stayed at the “Casa Pueblo Hostel“. We were really surprised to find such a green city: every, and we mean EVERY street is lined with trees on both sides, creating a green roof over the road, and there are lots of parks – one of them is large enough to spend a whole day there. To me it seems that Mendoza is one of the cities with the highest quality of life in Argentina. Since the whole region is especially famous for its wine, we also did a winery tour by bike (thanks to Mr Hugo for his warm hospitality). Compared to the others, we probably hold the record in bike kilometers and the negative record in wine tasting. We visited only one vineyard (second oldest in that region, Bodega Familia Di Tommaso), but this one we enjoyed, just as the olive farm we stayed at afterwards.

And to spend the very last evening in Argentina in a proper way, we went to a “parilla” and had “asado” from half past ten to one in the night: a microscopic undressed salad and meat with meat as first dish, a lot of meat with side dish meat as main course, and to conclude the dinner we had meat for the dessert. Of course without any sauce or anything, only meat dressed with salt. So not only our experiences but also our stomach reminded us of Argentina during a while ….