Torotoro - in the footsteps of dinosaurs

A dinosaur footprint and a REAL dinosaur

We arrived late in Torotoro and chose the first hotel we could find which happened to be very cheap at 50Bs for a private room. Unfortunately we discovered that the bottle of olive oil we had bought in Argentina had exploded all over our bags during the car journey and we spent most of the evening cleaning our belongings.

The next day we went to the guides' office and organised a trip that afternoon to El Virgen (pretty waterfalls at the bottom of a deep canyon). Two New Zealand girls arrived so we formed a group of 4 followed by a group of 4 Israelis which made the trip even cheaper. In hindsight we should have stayed as a group of 4 since the 4 late additions were very slow walkers and we didn't actually get to walk down the canyon to El Virgen... The guide explained that Torotoro was once at the bottom of a lake which is why we can now see dinosaur footprints in the rock beneath our feet. We walked to the very impressive canyon with its steep walls falling several hundred metres beneath our feet. On towards some slightly less impressive wall paintings of zigzag lines which our guide explained, without too much of a stretch of imagination, were the mountains in the distance.

The following day we were up early eager to find a group to go to the cave Purmamarca. Unfortunately after a peak through the guides office we saw the only people waiting were the 4 slow walkers from the day before. We waited until they had left and teamed up with Hezica (one of the NZ girls) before hiring a taxi to take us and our guide to the cave. Once at the cave we donned a helmet and headtorch and our guide (only one of 2 female guides in Torotoro) eagerly took us across some rocks and in to the entrance to the cave. Once in the cave our guide was great in helping Marie through some tricky sections despite her right hand still not being fully functional. The cave itself is big, we spent about two hours in a 3.5km section but the explored section totals about 7km of tunnels.We saw quite a few stalactites/mites and unfortunately many broken ones caused by the passage of people.

The same afternoon, slightly annoyed at not having been to El Virgen the day before, we set off with the two NZ girls minus the slow group of four and without a guide to discover what we had missed. The going was easy given that we knew the path now but we had a slightly awkward moment when we stumbled across our guide from the day before leading another group of tourists.It took us a while to get there (over 500 steps down to the bottom of the canyon) but we were rewarded with a swim in the river and a waterful shower to wash of the muddy river water. That evening we ate again with Hezica and Erinand treated ourselves to a 'luxury cone' after dinner (ice cream cone so-called because of how much better it looked than the other ice creams on offer).