We woke up, packed up, and took the town bus into Salta. First stop, the bus station. San Pedro de Atacama was our next planned stop. The only bus available in the next week left at 2 AM tonight (or tomorrow morning to be particular), so we booked it. That gave us the day in Salta to explore.
Next stop, a hill overlooking the city called Cerro St. Bernardo. There were 1070 stairs going up, up, and up about 500 feet elevation gain. Our legs were still pretty tired from the biking a couple days before! The hike was at least shaded though, and we saw a beautiful butterfly. Finally we got to a top and a great view of the city. (You can also see the chairlift that we opted not to take.) We sat down and had a picnic lunch at the top of apples, avocado, and hard boiled eggs.
After the hike, we did a lot of walking around Salta, taking in the churches, parks, monuments, popping into artesanal markets, and also stopping to use internet to book our hostel for the next night.
Our last stop of the night was a traditional dinner with live music called a Peña. We were told to get there “early”, so we got there right when they opened at 9 PM. If you remember, our bus doesn’t leave until 2 AM, so we know it is going to be a loooong dinner. For starters, we had chicken and beef empanadas, that were some of the best empanadas we have had. Next, we tried 2 very traditional soups for the area. Cassie had Locro, which was a hominy soup with beef, and Alejandro had cazuela de cabra (goat soup/stew). Again, both amazing. Next course was the baked cheese with herbs that we had talked about in a previous post, this one called Quesilleta. We took a break for a little while and tried some wine from the wine region around Salta called Cafayate (Yes, that is a bucket of ice that they served to PUT IN the already delicious wine… **head shaking slowly back and forth**).
At this point, we were a little disappointed because we still had not seen any music- it was all in a different room and we couldn’t hear very well. Then someone came to our table and asked if he could use a couple of our chairs. We said yes, and soon, there was an entire band in our small room of tables. They were fantastic! (We tried to put a video on, but apparently that isn’t allowed with our current edition of WordPress.)
Since all of the appetizers turned out to be a lot more food than we were expecting, we split a main course of Lomo Casonero, which was a 400g steak with fried egg, tomato, onion, pepper, and white wine sauce served with homemade chips. For dessert we tried the Torta Salteña (when in Salta, eat like the Salteños!), which was a multi-layer nougat cake. We were actually sad when we had to leave at 1:00 to catch our taxi to the bus terminal, which is completely opposite than we were expecting after 4 hours of being there!
Travel Fun With Cassie and Alejandro 
Oh my goodness! I guess you guys are burning off all of those calories! The cake looked delicious!
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