North West Argentina is stunning but doesn’t tend to make it to generic South American tour itineraries, usually overlooked in favour of Patagonia and only really featuring on more in-depth visits to Argentina. We had the luxury of time, and it was too bloody cold to even consider Patagonia in winter, so this area definitely made it onto our radar. Our original plan had included Jujuy & Salta provinces, but the altitude was just too high for us to risk Jujuy and so we decided to focus on Salta province and have a more relaxed road trip. We had intended to do a circular route to/from Salta, taking in Cafayate and Cachi, but ultimately opted to not subject ourselves to the unpaved part of Ruta 40 (one of the longest and most beautiful roads in the world), which would’ve involved 6 or more hours of boneshaking driving on gravel, instead splitting our week between the city of Salta and the dramatic wine region around Cafayate. Funny that we chose wine over dirt roads!

Salta

A 2 hour flight from Mendoza took us over some stunning landscapes, giving us a sneak peek of what our road trip would bring, to the city of Salta, just across the Andes from San Pedro de Atacama where we’d been a few weeks earlier. It was a tiny airport and we had our bags quickly, and soon realised that Uber surge pricing definitely applied whenever a plane arrived! But it was still only around £12 for a 20 minute journey into the city, through some areas that had us thinking ‘what the f*** are we doing here?’, before arriving in the Centro Storico and the lovely Villa Vicuna Boutique Hotel, our home for 3 nights. Within 15 minutes we’d dropped our bags into our room and headed across the street for beer, wine and pizza at a street cafe in the warm sunshine. And afterwards Debbie sat in front of our hotel’s outdoor fireplace and nodded off – it had been an early start after all!

Salta is one of Argentina’s most attractive colonial cities and we were staying just a couple of minutes walk from the lovely main square, Plaza 9 de Julio, with its magnificent cathedral and old municipal hall. We visited both, and the ornate Iglesias San Francisco, one of the most photographed buildings in the city, before taking a cable car up Cerro San Berardo for panoramic views over the city. Its fair to say that while the historic centre of Salta is beautiful, the sprawling city isn’t the most picturesque and on a cloudy day we really couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. The renowned Museum of High Altitude Archaeology, famous for its exceptionally preserved Inca child mummies, was on our agenda but sadly it was closed for the duration of our stay.

We learned more about Argentinian food in Salta – their empanadas are famous throughout the country for including potatoes and an olive. Debbie discovered Tamal – corn dough, somewhat like polenta, stuffed with meat and wrapped in a corn husk prior to steaming – lovely (Steve says tasteless but he hates polenta too). And of course we ate more excellent steak and drank more excellent Malbec!

World Cup fever was in full swing during our stay, with the city almost coming to a standstill on the day Argentina were playing – horns were blaring, every man an his dog was wearing blue and white, flags were being sold on every street corner and the cathedral was full of people praying for Lionel Messi’s left foot. There was also an England match and we thought it’d be good to watch it somewhere with a big screen and some atmosphere. Sadly we were the only football fans in the wine bar next to our hotel, but the owner must’ve thought Christmas had come early with the amount of Malbec we consumed while watching a pretty rubbish match and goal-less draw with Ghana.

It was in Salta that we learned just how ridiculous ATM charges are in Argentina! The transaction limit for foreigners appears to be 60,000 Argentinian Pesos (a little over £30) and the cash machine fee is around £7 per transaction. As Debbie is somewhat obsessive about always having cash, we made a few transactions and paid a stupid amount of commission to an Argentinian bank. We did have US dollars in cash, and they’d give us the best exchange rate, but we were saving those for emergencies. We also noticed that most menus didn’t include prices, those were either on a separate sheet or obtained by scanning a QR code – that’s because prices change almost daily due to inflation which is currently ‘only’ around 33%, but that’s a significantly better position than late 2023 when prices were increasing by over 20% PER MONTH.

We found Salta to be a nice enough city for a couple of days but the excursions & road trips starting from the city are a bigger draw. With that very intention we took an Uber back to the airport to collect our hire car and set off on our next adventure…

Cafayate

The 110 miles section of Ruta 68 between Salta and Cafayate is one of Argentina’s most scenic drives, winding through some spectacular landscapes and with the highlight being the last 40 miles through Quebrada de las Conchas (Shell Gorge). It was indeed utterly breathtaking, one of the most stunning landscape either of us had ever driven through, but we decided not to stop en-route and do a full day exploration of the area when we had more time to enjoy/appreciate it. Best to just get to our hotel before dusk. There was hardly any traffic on the road and the driving was easy, all very uneventful until Debbie ran over an olive branch, it got stuck under the car and made a hell of a dragging noise, so we pulled over to get it out. No joy, it was stuck and had managed to wedge itself in the front axel of the car. Both of us lay on the ground roadside and tried to free it, but the bodywork was low profile and there was almost no clearance. Bloody hell, we were in the middle of nowhere and with no phone signal. But Steve had his thinking cap on, found a small rock and got Debbie to ease the car forward so that the front wheel was on the rock and raised the front of the car – genius – and then he managed to free the branch (which turned out to be more the size of a small olive tree). Panic over we continued to Cafayate.

We’d decided to spend 5 nights in Cafayate – to relax, enjoy the scenery and sample some of the region’s wines – and had managed to negotiate a really good last minute deal at Patios de Cafayate Wine Hotel. It looked good on the website, and the reviews were favourable, but at £100/night including breakfast and daily wine, a tasting in the attached El Esteco historic winery, and one tasting menu with paired wines, surely it couldn’t be as good as it seemed. As soon as we drove through the estate gates we suspected that we’d found somewhere very special, and on entering the hotel this was confirmed – a truly gorgeous place and we were even upgraded from the cheapest to the most expensive room grade. Wow – this would do us VERY nicely thank you very much!

We spent a couple of days doing nothing except sitting in the winter sunshine, discovering the Argentina signature white wine grape Torrentes, marvelling at the beauty of our hotel set on a vineyard and the dramatic mountain scenery surrounding it, enjoying roaring log fires on cold evenings and sampling delicious food. Just gorgeous.

But we did need to do SOME exploration!

Around 55Km south of Cafayate on Ruta 40 we visited Cuidad Sagrada de Quilmes (turns of Quilmes), the largest pre-Colombian settlement in Argentina and one of the country’s most important archaeological sites. It was home to the Quilmes people who resisted the Spanish for over a century before finally being defeated and driven out in 1667. A magnificent terraced hillside settlement set amongst a cactus-filled landscape with restored stone dwellings and a fortress overlooking the village, it wasn’t quite Machu Picchu-level spectacular but it was pretty impressive. And on the drive back to Cafayate we concluded that this was a far more beautiful wine region than Mendoza. And the wines are pretty special too.

The more detailed exploration of Quebrada de las Conchas was one of the most visually stunning days of our South America trip so far, right up there with the Atacama Desert and Galapagos’s Bartolome Island. Famous for its dramatic red sandstone cliffs, canyons and rock formations sculpted by wind and water over millions of years, it is truly breathtaking. For around 70Km from Cafayate the scenery was stunning in every direction, with some notable stops along the way – Garganta de Diablo (Devil’s Throat), a narrow canyon with towering rock walls; El Anfiteatro (The Amphitheatre), a huge natural chamber with exceptional acoustics; Tres Cruces viewpoint, where Steve managed to climb a hill to apparently get one of the best panoramic views of the gorge (but more likely to chat to a group of young ladies who wanted to practice their English with him!). Lunch was in the rather special setting of Estacion Alemania, the old railway station in a beautiful location and with table laid on the disused tracks and cows wandering around! Words don’t do this landscape any justice and we aren’t sure that the pictures do either…

An early morning drive back to the airport wasn’t quite as dramatic as the light wasn’t as good and it was a cloudy day, but beautiful nonetheless. And a bonus was that the car hire people insisted that the damage to the wing mirror casing, that we know was caused by a stone when driving off-road, was actually present when we picked up the car so no charge. They obviously couldn’t be bothered with the paperwork and we weren’t going to argue!

A fabulous week and we can’t recommend this part of Argentina highly enough. For anyone prepared to do the unpaved section of Ruta 40 and take in Cachi, and/or tolerate the altitude in Jujuy province, this area would make an outstanding 2 week road trip. But for us, Buenos Aires beckoned…..