We have discovered that Argentina is a nation of lingerers. Argentines linger in cafes over coffee, in restaurants over lunch and over their late, late dinners. Typically Argentines begin dinner around 10 pm and have desert around midnight. The waiters will let you sit for hours and not bring your check until you ask for it. This has been hard for me to get used to as I am an eat and move on to the next thing kind of girl.  Mike is always telling me to slow down and after nearly a month in Argentina we are getting the hang of it.

Partly because of Madonna’s “Evita” movie, Americans (at least I did) place a larger importance to Eva Peron in history than Argentines do. She was part of their government as First Lady for only about six years. Yet, in the capital city of Buenos Aires there are several very obvious representations of her presence. Her likeness on the major building in the historic center, a statue in a plaza and her tomb in the National Cemetery. When we went to the cemetery all we had to do was follow the crowd to find her tomb.

This 1960s Bristol tour bus, manufactured in Liverpool, spent several years providing tours in London. It was then shipped from England to New York where it provided city tours for many more years before being shipped to Córdoba, Argentina where we took a city tour in it. According to the owner, notable passengers have been the Beatles, Jackie O and us.

Northern Argentina holds some beautiful and unique scenery. We took a long day tour to the Salinas Grandes to see the stark yet striking 2,300 square mile salt flats. Lunch was in a tiny, dusty town in the middle of nowhere (they had a really nice church).  Mike snapped my picture with this indigenous woman. She wanted us to buy some of her trinkets but we paid her for a picture instead. After hours of bumping along a dusty dirt road seeing only Vicuna (wild relative of Llamas and Alpacas), what a relief to finally see the piles of salt. The ancient dried-up river remnants that create a salt flat leave a completely surreal image. Surrounded by an immaculate white landscape, the only break in the horizon being the majestic Andes Mountains. The traditional method of harvesting the salt is to grow it in these linear troughs and then to periodically scrape them clean.

In the colorful gorge of the Quebrada de Humahuaca are these seven colored hills called the Painters Palette. These naturally occurring colors are layers of minerals and organic matter that collected in the area when it was under an ocean. In the foreground of the picture is a typical cemetery.

We met this friendly British couple who shipped their 1961 Morris Minor to South America for their tour of the continent. They have traveled around Africa twice in their car. We are amazed because we can’t imagine driving in countries where we don’t speak the language.

We took a twenty-four hour bus ride (our longest ever) to Puerto Iguazu to see Iguazu Falls, luckily it was worth it. Talk about wild water adventures, this is the ultimate water park. Our boat ride was wild as we fought the rapids to go into the falls. We had purchased plastic coats to protect us but one turn under the falls and we were soaked from head to toe. This picture is pre being drowned like a rat.  The size and scale are unlike any other waterfall on earth. It’s made up of a system of 275 waterfalls that span an area one and a half miles wide. The tallest of these waterfalls, called the Devil’s Throat, it drops by more than 240 feet. The thundering noise and heavy mist make it hard to stay close for very long.

As we leave Argentina heading for Bolivia, we can say we really enjoyed it here. The people are very friendly. The country is varied from a summer that’s like winter in Ushuaia to cosmopolitan Buenos Aries to the the country’s central farmlands (very similar to Central California) to the northern jungle around Puerto Iguazu.