The South American Odyssey

The Cascadas del rio colorado or the Siete Cascada are a bunch of 7 waterfalls on the Rio Colorado deep in a gorge near Cafayate. I had read mixed reviews about whether to take a guide there or not sonce the path after the 2nd cascade seemed to be quite hard to find without the help of a guie. But, we had the track marked on our Maps.me app so we felt confident enough to do it on our own.
Luckily, by the time we were reaching the cascades, it started getting quite cloudy and felt a bit more comfortable with the thought of doing the trek now.

We reached there around 3 pm and were immediately surrounded by a few villagers asking if we needed guides. When we told them we'll do it on our own they demand 20 ARS for parking to keep and eye on the car. We knew it was a free parking but we didn't think it wise to risk our vehicle for 20 ARS so we paid.
At the entrance was a person, who seemed from the village nearby, sitting under a tree with a box saying donations and a register to note the names and nationalities of the people going in. We entered our names in the register and asked if we could go in, to which he replied we needed to give a mandatory donation of 20 ARS (10 per head). This whole place reeked of a fraud and illegal exploitation of tourists. I didn't like this at all and when the guy was a bit distracted with Hristo's entry in the register, I quickly put in 2 notes of 5 ARS and pretended we've paid fully.
By now, it was quite cloudy and the villager told us to come back by 5:30 pm since it was going to rain later and they would close. We were very pissed with this since the trek to the last waterfall was supposed to take between 3-4 hrs and we were given just 2 hours. We anyways decided to go in now that we had paid and made up our minds to take our own sweet time. It was an open space so they had nothing they could close at 5:30 pm.Читать далее