Purmamarca and Tilcara

We are in Tilcara right now, a tiny town in the province of Jujuy, north of Salta. Despite its minute size, it´s a big turist hotspot, and thus has nice accomodations, food and internet access. This is our splurge place, and we are paying a total of 190 pesos (65ish dollars) to stay at the awesome Posada de Luz, with a huge, beautiful room and large grounds with pool!

We left this morning from Salta for the drive up; we rented a car from one of the 30 friendly car rentals in Salta, that we had reserved ahead of time via email. Tourism is booming and finding a car to rent is not quite that easy, since each firm has only about 20 cars or so. Demand has driven prices up, so we´re paying US$ 50 per day for the lowest-category car, a great little stick-shift VW Gol. We took the scenic route up from Salta, through an extremely winding, narrow road that was beautiful but somewhat nausea-inducing. Knowing this ahead of time we had bought some coca leaves in Salta´s main plaza from a street vendor; they kind of worked but are pretty nasty (you put a bunch in your mouth and chew), so we didn´t use them that much. After the winding road we had a flatter part before we started climbing again, more gently, through the Quebrada de Humahuaca, with some really incredible terrain (uploading a few pictures as I write, but it´s very slow). We stopped for lunch at Purmamarca, an even tinier place than Tilcara, but very cute. All these towns have dirt or gravel roads and little central plazas with a market; we bought a couple of things in Purmamarca, and had the famous empanadas of the region and a llama stew at the only place open at 3:30pm, a little kitchen that gave us some great home-cooked food.

Now we´re going to probably enjoy a nice dinner and perhaps a bottle of wine on our room porch, overlooking the surrounding mountains. Unfortunately the weather is not cooperating all that much, and there´s been some thunder; hopefully it won´t rain that much. The plan for tomorrow was to drive up a few hours to the little hamlet of Iruya, in the top of a mountain, but because of the rain it seems we might not be able to make it. It´ll be an interesting exercise to try to get accomodation around here since it seems most good places are all taken, but we´ll see.