Driving

Note: This entry is unfinished. The pictures are missing. The pictures will come soon.

This is the final installment of my two-part series for Salta, Argentina. Read the previous post for part one.

Monday might have been my favorite day of the trip so far. Let me tell you why. It started, as so many great days do, by taking a car into the country.

We rented a tiny little Chevy Corsa from Hertz. After some deliberation the night before, we had settled on taking a drive to Cafayate, which is a small town (although, at 12,000, it's the second largest in the province of Salta) 183km south of Salta. Those 183km take you through the Quebrada de Cafayate, roughly translated as Cafayate Canyon, which is a vast canyon that surrounded the now-extinct Río las Conchas. This drive was, in a word, unforgettable.

First, we were driving in Argentina! Neither of us has really made much mention of the road situation here, but it is markedly less civilized than what Americans are used to. Lanes, when the government has bothered to identify them, are treated more as mere suggestions than as, well, lanes. Stop signs are disregarded almost entirely. Pedestrians are fully responsible for their own safety, as drivers do not look. Ever. Speed limits are even less meaningless than they are in the United States, and by that I mean that there is absolutely no enforcement of speed limits whatsoever. All this to say that simply surviving the day without an accident is worthy of significant praise.

Second, I learned how to drive stick shift! I've never been behind the wheel of a car with manual transmission before, but the car Dylan learned to drive with was a manual, so he's entirely comfortable with it. At the beginning of the trip, he suggested I learn how. I said no, because I figured if I was going to scratch the gears on a car by accident, it should be the gears of someone who wouldn't get that mad at me, unlike Hertz. And I figured my first attempt should be in the United States, in case I needed to explain to the authorities why I was stalled in the middle of an intersection. However, as we were going along one of the most beautiful roads I've ever been on, seeing unbelievable scenery, I really, really wanted to drive. And Dylan wanted to be able to take pictures without pulling over every other kilometer.

So, about a third of the way in, as we were walking back to the car following yet another stop for a photo, I said I wanted to try. Dylan happily said it was fine with him, and we switched seats. He gave me a three minute lesson, neglecting to mention certain things that would wind up being important (e.g., don't stop the car in fourth gear). Obviously, I stalled the first time trying to get into first. But not the second! I did switch to second too soon, though, and the car was, well, clunking along for a little while before she finally calmed down. But then I was off, learning to drive manual transmission via trial by fire, discovering how to properly downshift coming out of hairpin turns overlooking 100 meter cliffs. We did turn the radio off to lessen the distractions to me, but when the view out the windshield is what you see in the pictures below, there's only so much attention you can afford to pay to the road. I would say, all things considered, that I did a pretty darn good job for my first time. Dylan was a great teacher, I must say, and he exercised patience with me at several points where I might not have had the roles been reversed.

The main reason this trip was so incredible, however, was because of what we saw out the windows at every turn. Colors of the earth that I had previously only known through pictures in National Geographic. Rock formations so bizarre that Dylan and I were both at a loss for how to reasonably explain them. The road wound through lush, verdant hills, hugged jagged, red cliffs, and eventually opened up into long stretches of straightaway that provided sweeping panoramas of the entire valley.

I don't have the ability to fairly describe what we saw without the aid of pictures, so the rest of this entry will be a small sampling of the hundreds of pictures we took, along with some captions.