Tues. Sept. 28, 2010 Cafayete

Today we got up at 8am, got ready and had breakfast. We checked out of our hotel and I went to blog and Marc took Zach for a walk. Zach already had his first nap of the day while I was blogging. We had lunch in Cachi-a town of 1500 people- (more regional food, I had locro-a kind of stew with beans, meat, pumkin, and tomato in it, Marc had volcan de pumkin-served in a little pumkin, quinoa risotto with cheese, and we also had an appetizer of provoleta-grilled goat cheese with seasoning on it) and then another guide, Beto, picked us up at 2pm to head on to Cafayete. We stopped at a couple small villages along the way just to see them briefly and take a couple pictures. But the guts of the trip to Cafayete was the scenery- wow! I feel like I keep thinking...ok more mountains isn´t it going to start to look the same...but no...it doesn´t. Everyday the mountains look so different. This part of the Calchaqi valley is dessert, dry, dusty, rocky, small flat cacti, whitish grey, desolate, severe, very few people, some adobe houses...something I think I might have expected to see in the middle east or northern africa. As we got closer to Cafayete (a town of 2000 people), we started to see vineyards. Cafayete has some of the highest, if not the highest, vineyards in the world, at 1700 meters. We arrived to Cafayete around 6.45pm. We checked in to our hotel and went out for dinner. We went to a parradillo???, because Marc was in the mood for one of those giant 2 inch steaks. We were there around 7.30pm and we were the only people in the restaurant! But more people started to come as we were leaving. As expected, the beef was good!