Caballos, vaca y tarántulas

    Today was our first day in Salta, and after allowing ourselves to recover from our long day of traveling, we spontaneously hopped on a bus to a place we'd heard about called San Lorenzo where we thought we could hike. The micro we got on took us through Salta, so we got to see a lot of the city on our way to hike. Salta seems a little cleaner than Mendoza because there are no acequias full of trash. The buildings and homes were very pretty too, some of them had great big plots of land, and were surrounded by beautiful fences.
    San Lorenzo is a city, but we went to the quebrada (canyon) of San  Lorenzo, where we found a picnic spot complete with tables and grills, next to a river. So we hiked up a trail we found by the river, seeing lots of cows and a few pheasants. The trail along the river was so green, and actually surrounded by trees, which is so nice compared to the desert of Mendoza. Since its Spring, all the trees are starting to bloom and the sun was shining. Hanging from a lot of the trees, you could see a bunch of nests made from dead leaves, which Jeanette informed me are tarantula nests. They had spider webs all over them. I was glad none feel on top of me. Our hike was great until we ran into a group of horse back riders that told us to turn around because we were on private property. So instead of getting discouraged, we decided to go on the horse excursion too. It was pretty cheap, and our guide took us for an extra hour than we paid for.
    We took the horses up some really steep trails full of rocks and tree roots. I had no idea horses were such good climbers. I was ducking under trees, and leaning forward and back to help the horse up and down the hills. We ended up in a few open meadows during the sunset. So beautiful!
    Our horses were really sassy, and the whole time we had to keep encouraging them to keep going, and eventually they listened to us. But it got kind of scary at one point when we got off the horses because we went to take a picture with the horses, and the one I had been riding turned around and kicked back his legs and hit Jeanette in the butt and me in the back of my calf! It actually hurt quite a bit but wasn't strong enough to cause any damage. I think Jeanette is going to have a nice bruise on her butt though. So for the second half of our excursion I rode the guide's horse, which was much more docile.
   After the horse ride, we were freezing so we found some pizza and hot drinks, and prepared to get up at 6 am for our next adventure.