Cafayate

Our ride out of Belen was fairly spectacular as we headed off into the mountains following the course of a river bed. It’s amazing how the scenery knows to change after every time and we wound our way through a spectacular Valley for at least an hour. We then seem to appear on a high plane Where we had a dead straight road for at least 15 km running through a high desert landscape. The temperature is beginning to climb now and we are constantly seeing 27 or 28° every day. We stopped in the desert section to take water and photos and then dropped down Into a green valley before heading that way up again towards Cafayate

Today was a very fairly short day due to us, trying to catch up with our schedule and we arrived at the Vineyard Hotel around lunchtime. Our rooms were not ready, so we sat in our riding gear on a very posh veranda and ordered empanadas, and hummus. Along with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the world’s highest vineyard. Funnily enough by the time we finished lunch the rooms are ready..

What a spectacular place. This is higher above Caféyate on the side of a mountain overlooking the town and vineyards all the way to the town. The whole place is irrigated by a fantastic spring from high in the mountains. We rested up for the afternoon and had a lovely dinner at the hotel as well before taking an early night. Tomorrow we have the day off and we are going to explore the town itself.

Even though we had nothing to get up for today, we were both at breakfast as soon as it opened at 7:30. For some reason we can’t get out of our habits of up and out early. Even by the time we were getting on our bikes and heading Calafate town. There were still guests going in for breakfast.. We rode the 3 km into town park the bikes in the central Square under some trees.

We walked to the town a little bit and bought to Central supplies for our trip tomorrow, mainly water. And then decided that we would stop for lunch and a beer. We decided to go local today and eat the traditional northern Argentinian food of tamales and Lorca. Both of these are corn based Dishes. And with local Argentinian beer we felt very “in country.“ after lunch we headed back to the hotel for an afternoon of laundry, which we could dry outside very quickly and walking in Vineyards. All in all a pretty good day.