San Salvador de Jujuy

Today was a short day.
After our first Argentinian Breakfast - a cup of coffee and some sweet puffy-pastry crackers with butter and Dulce de Leche - we started on the 30km descent towards San Salvador de Jujuy.

Well, before we could start on the actual descent there were still 10km of climbing in front of us.
But even with the headwind, climbing felt easier than ever after month spent on ~4000m and our high elevation training had us flying up the climbs.

The continuous downhill that followed felt like heaven, taking us from 2200m to 1200m, with gradually changing vegetation, in no time.
Hard to believe that 2 days ago we were on the barren Altiplano with not much more than dead sand, rocks and the occasional yellow bundle of dry bushy grass, and now we were racing down mountains covered in thick and noisy (Hello, Cicadas! 🦗) jungle.

Once we arrived in Jujuy we found ourselves a lunch place with Wifi to figure out how and where to get sim cards and money and to book a place for the next nights so we could get some well deserved rest days before continuing to Salta.

Generally, Argentina feels very different from Peru and Bolivia. Shop vendors and restaurant personnel are extremely friendly, welcoming and chatty and seem genuinly happy to have customers 🤯
Also towns look very different, with the majority of houses actually looking finished, livable and even quite beautiful....In places you might even think you've been teleported back to Europe.

The only problem: the Argentinian accent . Everyone had warned me it'd be tough, but I didn't belive it until now.
Having improved my spanish quite a bit over the last months and having been able to have some nice
conversations with people in general, I was shocked by my inability to even understand the most basic things in Argentina...extremely fast speech, different pronunciation of "y" and "ll" as well as a miriad of new/different vocabulary are making communication so much more difficult. I hope time will help getting used to it.

At lunch I was once again blown away by the Argentinian prices. With inflation at almost 150% over the last year and tourists receiving the blue dollar rate when withdrawing cash, which is 3 times the official exchange rate, everything seems incredibly cheap. A full meal, including a beer in a fancy looking place in the towns main plaza came to a total of 4000 Ars = ~4€ 🤯 Maybe I should just move to Argentina on a European salary? 🤔

For the next 2 days we rented out an entire apartment for as little as 6$ per night per person and used the rest days to sleep, eat a lot of good food and get some logistics sorted.

🚴‍♀️ Distance cycled: 30 km
💶 Peso notes received: ~100
🦆Scrooge McDuck level: 9/10
⏸️ Rest days taken: 2
🥟 Empanadas eaten: 12もっと詳しく