For a border town, Ala Quianca rates at the top of the list. Most border towns in Central and South America (or Africa for that matter) are usually real cesspools and best when left behind in the rear view mirror. Ala Quianca was a very clean little town with some interesting buildings and we actually felt pretty safe there – but then, we had just left Bolivia.
We did encounter a minor problem when we discovered Argentina has different electrical plugs – what?! I didn’t read about that in the travel brochure – so we marched around town looking for some adaptor plugs and trying to figure out how to ask for them in Spanish. We finally found them at a little hardware store and we got all our little goodies plugged in for charging.
We got off to a liesurely start and once we found the south exit to town we started ripping down the highway. We pulled into our first Argentinian gas station and we all felt like we were back in the States – this place had multiple grades of gasoline, a real store that sold something other than oil, a little bakery, clean restrooms (with toilet paper!), and free WiFi. We filled up our tanks, grabbed some baked goods and surfed the internet looking for a place to stay in Salta.
After we finally got Wes to leave the gas station – we headed south again towards Salta. The entire morning was a very welcome eyeopening reminder that we had left Bolivia. The road sides were clean of trash, the cars were somewhat modern, there were a lot of private cars (versus millions of taxis), and the drivers were actually (sometimes) obeying the traffic laws.
We had some special roads marked on our maps that we had heard were great biking roads. One of those was Route 9 (Ruta 9) going into Salta. This thing turned out to be a single lane (maybe 1 and 1/2 lanes at times) which twisted back and forth, up and down and was a blast to ride. We initially thought it was a one way (going our way of course!) until we met a car – surprise! From then on we cut back on the speed and lean angles.
We came across some water running over the road and decided to make a few passes thru it to take some pictures of each other riding thru it –
We rolled into Salta with grins on our faces and came across a moto shop within a few minutes. Wes needed some parts so we pulled in to have a look. Wes bought a tire and some brake pads and John remembered he needed some rear brake pads as well so we picked them up.
With the help of the GPS we found the hostel fairly quickly but were disappointed to find they didn’t have any secure parking for the motos. So – we bailed on that one and began the riding around looking for a hotel plan. Eventually Wes and John just parked while Dan rode around to find a hotel. We found one and we all went to check in. When we rang the bell – a fat man with a dirty shirt and boxer shorts comes out to see us – we start talking to him in Spanish and he says “You Germans?” – “ah, no” – “You Americans or English?” – “ah, yea” – he then goes into perfect English with a New York accent. Starts telling us that he only rents for a minimum of 3 nights but he’d cut us a deal for 2 etc… and then he says everywhere is full. We decide to call bullsh*t on him and take off.
We found a decent place with secure parking out by the bus station – although the interior decoration of the hotel was vintage 1980’s porn movie…. but we were tired and ready for bed.
Cheers!
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