Salta (October 19th - 21st, 2013)

Salta is a beautiful colonial city. We stayed there for three relatively hot days, happy to be rescued by the delicious ice cream at Grido. We also had some really good grilled meat, went to a museum and a concert, but mainly just walked around and admired the town.

We were starting to run low on the Argentinian Pesos we had acquired in Brazil, and thus needed to find a money exchanger. We weren't sure how to go about doing this, but assumed that if we'd walk around the center of town, looking like tourists, maybe somebody would notice us. Indeed, after some minutes of ambling on the main square, we heard someone shout "Cambio! Cambio!". For quite a decent rate, we exchanged some dollars and checked the pesos for validity (funny money is said to be abundant) right there on the street. It really wasn't as complicated as I had imagined.

We continued walking around the main square, with Salta's beautiful cathedral on one side and the old cabildo (town hall) opposite of it. When we reached the provincial theater, also on the square, we saw that there would be a free baroque concert there the same evening. We were a bit worried that our clothes would be too casual, but when we asked about it, we were assured that it wouldn't be a problem. Thus, later that evening, we heard the Camerata Lazarte perform six suites by Tomaso Albinoni. It was such a delight to hear classical music again, for the first time since we'd left Europe. We ended our evening at a steak house (El Charrua) and had a truly delicious bife de chorizo.

Salta's cathedral, pink during the day ...

... and yellow at night

On the following day, we went to the Historical Museum of the North, located within the cabildo building. Perhaps the most memorable exhibits there were a set of Roman coins (although I'm not sure what Julius Cesar had to do with the history of Northern Argentina) and a gigantic 1911 Renault limo.

The Historical Museum of the North is located in the beautiful colonial cabildo building 

This car is apparently larger than a hummer

We got a bird's-eye view of the city on the following day when we walked up the Cerro San Bernardo. It was a thirty-minute walk uphill, so we were happy that the weather had cooled down a bit. The views, however, would probably have been more spectacular with a clear sky.

There's a nice park with waterworks at the top of Cerro San Bernardo

After returning downtown, we had lunch in the same steak house we'd been to earlier, and made the mistake of ordering a grill platter for two people: it was very good, but simply too much. What we couldn't eat we later gave to a young guy who said he's hungry.

I didn't want to eat meat for a while after this delicious, but enormous lunch

Soon afterwards, we retrieved our luggage from the hostel and caught a night bus to Córdoba.

We have a couple of additional photos of Salta here.