Cafayate & Amaicha & the road to Tinogasta

From Cachi we traveled to Cafayate. This took quite some time, since you need to wait for the bus from Cachi to Angastoca, and there you need to wait for the bus from Angastoca to Cafayate again. Both busses take a couple of hours. In the evening we arrived in Cafayate. We made a good pasta salad and we walked around the nice plazas of Cafayate.

There are several vineyards around the city. In the morning we went to two bodegas, places where they make and sell wine and where you can taste the wine. We tried some wines in two bodegas, although I don't really like wine. For me it was just because you have to have done it at least once in Argentina, for Ariana it was also because she really likes it.

After Cafayate we were going to visit Monique, the cousin of my dad. She lives in Tinogasta, and there was no real good bus connection between us and Tinogasta, or any of the places in between. So we had to hitchhike in the direction of Tinogasta. It took quite a while before anyone picked us up, but in the end a young architect took us to a nearby village. He had to work there for a little while so he said that he could take us a bit further if we would still be there in an hour. Less than an hour later he took  us along again to Amaicha. In Amaicha we visited an amazing museum! It is called Pacha Mama and it is designed by an artist called Cruz. The place was completely decorated with stones, plants and mosaic art works, a mix of the native culture and modern art. We both really loved the design. The expositions they had were really nice too.

The continuation of our journey started smoothly, we were picked up and dropped of in Santa Maria in no time. However, we were dropped of at the main plaza in Santa Maria, and it was still quite a long walk to the road in the right direction. Walking in the hot sun with big backpacks doesn't really go fast and is quite tiring.. When we finally arrived at a point that looked like a good place to start hitchhiking it took hours before someone picked us up. They could only bring us to the next small (tiny) village (couple of houses). It was already starting to get a bit darker so we were scared that we had to spend the night there without a good place to sleep.

Luckily, already the next car that passed took us along. I think this was the weirdest car we have traveled with so far. It was a truck that was selling watermelons and bags of sugar, it had a large speaker on its roof through which it played music and Spanish sentences to let people know they were coming and they drove really slowly through every street of every village they passed. We could sit in the back of the car until we reached a small village called Hualfin, which is located just before Belen. Belen is one of the bigger towns on the road to Tinogasta. When we arrived in Hualfin it was already dark and there was only an expensive hotel nearby. So the truck drivers offered us a place to sleep; they were with two cars and we could each sleep in the front cabin of one truck. They had their own beds in the back of the car. It's an interesting way of traveling when hitchhiking! We have met so many nice people :)

The next morning we went on to hitchhike again, the watermelon sellers would sell their stuff along the way and thus travel very slowly, so we decided to try to catch another car. We really felt like we were in the middle of nowhere there. Hualfin is quite a small village surrounded by mountains. Not many cars passed along the main road just outside the village. We have the feeling that the less cars there are, the easier it is to be picked up by a car, because everytime when we waited next to a more quiet road one of the first cars could take us somewhere. Here, the second car that passed took us 25 kilometers in the right direction. Waiting there a bit, one of the first cars took us another 10 kilometers to the next village. Traveling bit by bit, it took us about 4 cars and a couple of hours to get to Belen.

Belen is a bigger city and there no one wanted to take us.. Luckily we could hop on a bus to a next village, Londres, from which we could take a bus to a cross road where we had to get out to catch a bus to Tinogasta. Finally, in the evening, after some days of traveling, we have reached Tinogasta!