2008 August 07 « a+b ramblings

We just arrived back in Salta, beating the ample dust from our clothes and eyeing the Bolivian border, which we will cross tomorrow by foot at the ripe hour of 8:00 a.m. That´s right, gentle readers, time to strap in for another overnight busride north!

If you´re scratching your heads wondering where we´ve been since leaving Cachi two days ago, well, not to put too fine a point on it, we´ve basically been hiding out in a desert paradise. The hotel we found outside Cafayete called La Casa de la Bodega is a small hotel-boutique winery with eight rooms and the capacity to produce just 6,000 liters of wine per year (and actually producing only about 4,000). It is set in a stunning red rock desert valley with towering mountains to the east and northwest and is surrounded by fertile agricultural land, including an organic goat farm (that happens to sell scrumptious goat cheese as well as fresh young goats — for braising — to the hotel´s restaurant). The accommodations were the most deluxe we´ve enjoyed to date, all for a whopping $120 per night. So yes, a splurge, but after more than five weeks on the road haven´t we earned it?

Our day yesterday consisted of an impromptu four-hour hike through the desert landscape surrounding the hotel, half a dozen games of chess in the hotel garden, a couple bottles of wine produced right there at the winery and that´s about it. We entertained the idea of staying on again tonight but we were getting antsy to reach Bolivia, seeing as Allison only has about ten days left before she´s back on a plane to San Francisco. Hard to believe we´re in the final leg of our joint journey. After she leaves, my plan is to travel more extensively through Bolivia and then head either to Peru or the Atacama desert in Chile.

Ready for the bad news? We´re still without a power cord for the laptop and will be for the rest of the trip. Which means no more pictures or videos until Allison is back home. (Sorry!) After two dozen phone calls to customs, FedEx and other courier services, we discovered that the power cord that Dennis sent to us from the U.S. got held up because customs 1) won´t allow packages to be delivered from the U.S. to a guest at a hotel and 2) won´t allow packages containing used computers or computer parts to be delivered without a physical signature from the recipient. If we had more time, we could have the package transferred from Buenos Aires to Salta, but it would take a few days and that´s valuable time we could be using to explore the Bolivian altoplano and the Amazon jungle! We seriously considered making the sacrifice so that you, our faithful readers, could share in the phototographic documentation of our adventure since Mendoza but the price to pay for multimedia is simply too high. We recognize that without photos we may lose some readers (I can think of one in particular), but for the next couple weeks you´ll just have to rely on the written word for your nightly entertainment.

Other than that we´re doing swell and will write more from across the border…

ON TO BOLIVIA!

The Delightful La Casa de la Bodega