Days 179 & 180 – Friday 17th & Saturday 18th March 2006
The overnight bus was an absolute pleasure, I arrived feeling pretty good and checked into a decent hostel with a dorm to myself. The town beckoned and I headed pretty much straight out to see it. As I reached the plaza the old men of the town seemed to be putting on some kind of demonstration and the police were out in force, kitted out in riot gear in case the old boys became violent.
The town didn’t seem to have that much to offer, but as the place where Argentina signed its declaration of independence in the 1800′s I visited the Museum which told the story of the independence and the first Government of Argentina.
I booked a tour for the following day to see some nature outside of the town, and fo the rest of the day soaked up the town and in the evening I thought about going out for a drink but having an early morning I decided against it.
In the morning the tour guide picked me and a Canadian couple up and we left Tucuman and drove out towards an Argentinian favourite, a place where the rich buy second homes, Tafi Del Valle. Located beside a large lake it had a much cooler climate than Tucuman and the hills that surrounded it made it look as though it would be a great retreat from the city.
We stopped at a museum in Tafi which was all about the way people lived there in pre-Colombian times, but it was a pretty disappointing musuem and there wasn’t much to report. Another museum we visited was in a village on the other side of the lake from Tafi, in actual fact it was more of an Archaelogical site than a musuem. It was a series of stones that had been put in the field, again in pre-Colombian times, each stone had a meaning and a signifcance, some being dedicated to the sun and the gods, other being dedicated to pregnant women, and others being rather phallic.
From Tafi we drove on up through another ravine, this one was a bit drier than the first one, in fact it was pretty much a desert! It still gave some incredible views though.
After stopping for yet another steak dinner we pressed on to the Ruins of Quilmes, a pre-Colombian site, about which not much is known, so I can’t really write much, apart from it was pretty cool to climb in amongst the ruins and up the cliff to a decent point from which to snap away some more photos.
That was about it for the tour, we drove back the way we had come, and arrived back in Tucuman at about 6pm. I thought about going out during the eveing for a few beers but there was no one in the hostel and I couldn’t be arsed to be billy-no-mates so I ended up going for dinner and returning to the hostel for an early night.
