After a good sleep we woke with batteries recharged and a beautiful day ahead of us.
We were up earlier than all apart from Dave who was breakfasting alone. He had just received his new travel contract and we toyed with the idea of following him east, over coffee and Medialunes or mini sweet croissant.
Breakfast over, we made up for lost time with the available internet connection and updated everything that we could before venturing out into the late morning warmth.
After a brief walk around Placa 9th July, it was lunch and we sat in the sunshine at City Café on the square, waving at fellow Drag-Truckers who were doing the same thing, and fending off pigeons. The lady at the next table was overwhelmed by a flock of them and it took a swipe or two with the menu to dislodge the flying free-loaders.
Salta was a delicious return to the normality of city life after time in the wilderness.
The beds were comfortable and the air was warm. Salta boasts the oldest public building in Argentina on the square, together with a host of elegant Spanish hotels and a theatre, all in the colonial style, wrapped around a green park with a pretty band stand and an equestrian statue that would have been at home in an Italian piazza.
The highlight of the square is another Inglesi Catedral dating from the 19th century. The exterior is wedding cake white with twin towers and a dome. The interior is an explosion of red velvet and golden ornamentation that makes the most outrageous Catholic Church in the UK they look more than a little drab. Incense and incantations floated on the air as worshippers thronged to the Rosary.
When the sun set, the Cathedral was lit spectacularly, reflecting in the toweringly inappropriate glass and steel office block next door that clearly paid the right price to the authorities for planning permission, under the special exception permitted by suitcases of cash delivered in the night time.
In the afternoon we caught the Teleferic to the summit of San Bernado and drunk coffee as the hard-core runners ground their way up the hill and the free-wheeling cyclists undid all their hard work. We walked down in the sunshine along the winding road, pausing only to dive out of the way of a careering cyclist who hit a hump and bounced out of his saddle before face-planting into the road surface. He lay still while he undertook his internal damage assessment while I walked to help him up.
Afterwards, Clare said that she saw it as an elaborate distraction to relieve me of the camera that was dangling around my neck.
As I reached the prostrate cyclist he was up and on his way, with a firm grip on the camera strap. After a brief struggle and some girlish flapping off the arms in his general direction, he was on his bike and heading down the hill, unrewarded for his spectacular crash stunt.
Clare had been right all along.
The tea-leaves will try anything to rob you. Distraction is the key to enabling their talented fingers to explore for the whereabouts of your valuables, however carefully they are concealed.
They will squirt you will foul smelling liquid or crowd you in the market to lift your wallet. Favourite is planting something on you as a pretext for an allegation of theft. False police roam the streets demanding to see valuables. Old ladies with babies are the worst as they have both the equipment to lower your guard and the experience to exploit any moment of weakness.
By evening we were perched in the Van Gogh Bar eating empanadas when Bert and Vanessa filed in, saw us and doubled the empanada order.
As we were up early for another 13 hour odyssey to San Pedro in Chile, we retired early again for the 5am wake up call.
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