Kristy and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary on May 10, and we were excited to use this as an excuse to indulge a bit. After months of bad mattresses with pilly linens and cheap bus seats with questionable stains, we were ready to live large.
We started by splurging on an “executive class” bus ticket to Salta, a beautiful city in northwest Argentina. Argentine buses are some of the best in Latin America, but after countless overnight trips in our usual class – semi-cama (i.e. your seat is semi like a bed in that you occupy it at night time) – we were ready to see what a real elite experience was like. Spa treatments? Warm cookies? We weren’t sure what it all meant but gee was it expensive and gee were we excited!
We’d get on the bus on May 9, wake up 20 hours later on our anniversary and be at a fancy Salta hotel in time for check in! Clever, aren’t we?
Sadly, full cama seats still don’t go quite flat, and are almost worse since they recline enough to take you out of a seated position so you slowly slide down throughout the night and end up in the fetal position near the foot rest. But, no bother! We had more arm room than usual, and while executive service was nicer in our imaginations, they did serve terrible wine with dinner. We had hit the big time!
A quick note about bus food: it’s terrible, no matter your class. BUT, I think another possibility is that it’s just misunderstood. You know how contestants on cooking shows will pretentiously prepare a dish “three ways”?
“Well Tom, allow me to present my signature ‘bacon and eggs three ways’. This is a strip of bacon wrapped around a hard boiled quail egg, this is a fried egg with bacon bits in a reduced red wine sauce, and this is an actual pig stuffed with roe, rotating on a spit!”
I like to think the culinary masters behind bus food had the same thought, but each meal is enriched white flour, sugar and ham three ways. “This, Ms. Blue, is a cold cut on a soggy piece of wonder bread, cut triangularly. Here we have chunks of ham and a sugar spread rolled in a mysterious white dough, and finally, a croissant with, you guessed it, HAM and an oddly sweet mayonnaise!”
Anyway, this all washes down quite nicely with a plastic cup of bottom shelf wine, and we were still feeling pretty important until…the rain beating down on the bus penetrated the ceiling and began dripping on our executive seats. After a few hours with napkin barriers on our laps we finally stopped, got off the bus, and loaded onto a more water-tight, but significantly shittier, less executive-y vehicle…but, umm, no biggie! We’re still VIP ticket holders, things are bound to look up!
We fell asleep and around 7am I woke up on a stationary bus. Strange, must be some kind of border stop or driver piss break. I drifted back off and woke up to the same view around 9. WTF was going on? I stumbled off the bus – we appeared to be at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and our driver and bus attendant were sitting at a diner eating breakfast and sharing a laugh.
We were finally able to deduce that the wheels on our new bus had bad bolts, and we had actually been there since 6am waiting for a mechanic to come from the nearest town 5 hours away. Swell.
Ok, umm… no worries! It was now officially our anniversary and we weren’t going to allow this to ruin our super romantic plans. We got a cup of coffee and sat at the diner (staring lovingly into each others’ eyes of course) until the hero arrived with the bolts around noon.
We finally rolled into Salta around 6pm, well after hotel check in and 30 hours after we had started our journey.
Luckily, our VIP sleeping experience went much better than our transportation experience, and we stayed at the excellent Kkala boutique hotel in Salta (half off the room rate while the pool is being worked on – score!) If you know anything about Kristy and me, you know we are not good at being fancy, especially after six months of wearing the same three shirts and feeling generally displeased about how we smell, but we did our best, and the anniversary ended on the highest of notes.
And now, a quick summary of some of the other things we did in the north of Argentina:
San Ignacio
Highlights: Strolling completely alone through the eerily beautiful ruins of the San Ignacio and Santa Anna Jesuit missions.
Lowlights: Struggling with the shades of gray reality of missions – safe havens for indigenous people who would have otherwise been slaughtered or weird prisons of forced Catholicism?
Salta
Highlights: Besides the Kkala hotel, taking the teleferico to the top of Cerro San Bernardo and enjoying the view.
Lowlights: Somehow managing on multiple occassions to eat the country’s best empanadas (allegedly) hours after purchase and therefore cold.
Purmamarca
Highlights: A walk by the breathtaking “mountain of seven colors”.
Lowlights: Kristy finally purchasing that authentic, woven Andean blanket she’d been wanting, only to read later that most goods being sold in that town are made in China.
Humahuaca
Highlights: A trip to the otherworldly Serrianas del Hornocal.
Lowlights: Knowing our next step was leaving this amazing country.
The Traveling Blues 