It's hard to capture the events of the last days in words. We rented a Renault Clio and went all the way up north to La Quica and already on the way up we saw incredible changes in the landscape. The mountains had all this different colors, there was Kaktee forests, we did a little side trip to a salt lake were we drove up a crazy pass road, that looks really cool to skate on! And on the way up to La Quica we drove up to 3500 m not even knowing it.
Then the plan was to take the routa 40 down to Cachi and cross over to Salta again. But man, it's the rainy season.
«And the Renault Clio is not an offroader»
During the rain season the routa 40 gets in some parts taken by the rivers. So there is no more routa to drive on. Basically we ended up driving thru a river bed towards a big wall. Which ended up being a few big walls that formed a zic-zac canyon where the river runs thru — and with the river us. But occasionally we were able to see parts of the routa 40 and knew we were on the right track.
On the other side we were really glad that we made it all the way thru the canyon, but that was just the beginning. Only a few kilometers later we run into a group of offroader, that couldn't decide if it would be possible for them to go thru the next river. It was actually just knee deep but not possible for our little car.
So we had to turn back yet another time, but this time there was another road we could take (the guys in the offroader told us about this). Well long story short, we ended up getting stuck in some turns were the water took away the road. Luckily we had my ice-tools in the car and were able to dig ourselves out. And we were set to keep going, in the night with a lot of rain, Alexis navigating me thru the massive cracks in the road. Digging new passages, pushing the car because it wouldn't get enough air to start uphills.
Only when we hit another river that we couldn't cross we knew — that we would have to go thru the canyon again to get back to Salta...
P.S. — salt lakes are cool!!!