Cachi and the Last Supper

Spanish classes are now over and we realise that the knowledge imparted by Graciela is of the disappearing ink variety (ie: as soon as you pay her, you forget everything). If in doubt, mime.

We have to begin cycling at some point so we stocked up on supplies at the supermarket and caught a bus to Cachi, a beautiful little village high in the mountains above Salta as our launch point. This wasn't the type of coach that Argentina is famous for, with fully reclining seats and wine and steak served at your seat, this was the chicken-on-your-lap, let's keep picking up more people even though we're three-to-a-seat, 'no, your bikes will have to balance on the roof' type of bus (some people paid the driver in plants instead of money?!) Once the passengers had thinned out to about a hundred, mostly being dropped off seemingly in the middle of a desert with no signs of habitation for miles in any direction, we could see through the windows, and the journey was spectacular. It passes through the Las Cordones national park, famous for it's amazing candelabra-shaped cacti, some up to 9m high and nearly a thousand years old. It was also our first glimpse of the terrain that we'd be cycling through on our first leg. Hundreds of kilometers of desert.

We chose Cachi because it is roughly at the northernmost (bike-accessible) point of the Ruta40, the single road that continues all the way to the Antarctic ocean, but also because it's high ... the theory is that our trip will mostly be downhill. It's a picture-postcard sleepy little village, high in the desert, with cobbled streets and raised walkways, supposedly a bit similar to Cuzco (albeit on a much smaller scale). We camped for the first time here, to test the tent, stove, filter etc before we got too far from civilization, and everything seemed to work fine. Apart from our cooking skills. We begin the journey tomorrow morning.