Humahuaca, Purmamarca, Jujuy, Tilcara and Maimará - how can anyone resist with names like that..

Confession; I had heard that Northern Argentina was very scenic, stunning etc and I knew I wanted to explore it; but the main reason we chose to hire a car and drive north from Salta was because I loved the names of the tiny towns there. They sounded so exotic! The towns are in the extreme Northwest of Argentina in Jujuy Province, on the borders of Bolivia and Chile.

Jujuy (it's so much fun to pronounce - try coughing up a fur-ball and hooting like an owl at the same time and you'll get close) is also the largest town in the area with just under 300,000 inhabitants. All other towns in the region are small and the population is overwhelmingly indigenous, with traditional clothing, customs and housing still joyfully in evidence.

Wildflowers in Jujuy Province

Hiring a car and driving through this region proved to be a great decision, we could see more, stop just about every 30 seconds to take a photo of the incredible landscape we were passing, and get into the mindset of driving on the right-hand side of the road (which I'd never done before) without too much traffic around. As there are so few roads in the area it's hard to get lost and the people are very friendly so we decided if we did ever need help, it would only have been moments away.

Our brave little VW; who needs a 4WD?!

Tourism is very important but still quite new to the area; 80% of tourists are Argentine, 12% from other South American countries, 7% from Europe and therefore I'm guessing at this stage, far less than 1% Australian....but it's somewhere I can't recommend highly enough to anyone with a mild sense of adventure, a Spanish phrase book and a desire to discover a very beautiful, almost untouched part of the world.

Individual blog posts on the towns we discovered to follow...
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