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Route 40 is a beautifully scenic road winding through the northwest portion of Argentina. A bit south of Salta, the largest city in the region, we hit the top of this road. Happy to find that Argentina has signage, with arrows, names of towns, and names of roads(!), we easily began winding through wine country.
It's hard to describe how different it is to be traveling by motorcycle than in one of the tour buses that transfer tourists between the highlights of the guidebook. So often I've commented to a backpacker about the beauty of a region or the customs of the people on the countryside through which they had just travelled and been answered with a long pause. "... Eer, I think I slept through all of that..." Having slept my way through more than one bus traversing the Mexican countryside on previous trips, I relate. But our method of travel, where one is forced to accept the scenery as the world, rather than a scrolling television screen, feels more like existing in squiggly lines across the map rather than a series of points. This drive combined layers of climates. Beginning in mountains stained by various minerals as if by a watercolorist, then turned to a dense green jungle. The road narrowed to a single-lane-width, was immaculately paved, but was striped for and carried two-way traffic in what may have been the twistiest road of the entire trip. After 100km or so of jungle, we moved into a rocky region where the road followed a river valley. Strange rock formations reminiscent of Moab were punctuated by small signs along the highway.
At the southern end of this valley, the landscape flattened, became a bit greener, then became a series of wineries. This collection of wineries looked and felt much like Northern California. This was Cafayate. We found a campground (with WiFi!) and set up our carpa.
We did some cooking on our little camp stove (which was a Christmas present from my Mum) and tried the local almuerzo (lunch). Locro is a delicious corn/bean/beef stew which sticks to the ribs. We also sampled some cab.sav. ice cream (which tasted rather alcoholic). Wandering through town, we came across an older fellow with a couple adventure-type motos and got to talking. He invited us into his garage for a while where we discussed old cars, mechanics, and blues music as best we could in our meager Spanish. The accent here is taking a bit of adjustment for us to hear, but we're getting better at it.
Oh yeah... and I saw a wall with 8 cats sitting on it... one of them jumped off... so there are only 7 in this pic... but lots of cats... whoaa...