Moving on from Salta, our next stop was Cafayate, a small wine town about 189 kilometres southish of Salta. It’s not that far away distance-wise, but the drive took a good 9-10 hours, partly because we took a roundabout route through a small town called Cachi, made lots of stops (lots of amazing scenery!), and 80% of the road from Cachi to Cafayate was unpaved.
Following on from my Salta post, the morning after our free day in the city, a private driver/guide picked us up early in the morning to take a trip to the Humahuaca Valley, taking in the small town of Purmamarca and the Salinas Grandes salt flats.
With Antarctica off the cards, instead of going home or staying in Buenos Aires (while a great city, I don’t think we could’ve spent two full weeks there), we had to decide what we were going to do instead.
Our travel agent was very helpful – they had an office in Buenos Aires, so we dropped in for a chat – and less than an hour later we had an alternative itinerary for the rest of our time in Argentina, with our first stop being Salta.
After spending the day walking around Buenos Aires, that night we headed to Palermo Hollywood for a three course “interactive dinner”.
Now if you’re anything like me, the words “interactive dinner” are a bit off putting (and weird and maybe scary – hey I just want to be served dinner, I don’t want to have to work for it) but! the evening was a lot of fun and *exactly* what we needed to take our minds off the fact that – 8 hours before we were due to fly to Ushuaia – the flights website we’d used *still* hadn’t confirmed that the Ushuaia leg was indeed cancelled (and therefore didn’t affect our flight back to Australia if we didn’t show up). No stress indeed.
Our latest holiday was meant to be the Grand Antarctic Adventure.
Unfortunately we were hit with a string of back luck, with not just one but two cancelled cruises (on different companies and for different reasons).
The first one was cancelled a week before we were due to leave, but we were able to book on a different one with a rather expensive deviation to our flight plans.
The second one, hilariously (I can laugh about it now, it’s been three weeks), was cancelled while we were in transit to Buenos Aires and we received notification after checking into our hotel.
With all other voyages full, and the fact that we were already in Argentina and had limited choices to make regarding flights, the Grand Antarctic Adventure was over before it had even begun.