Rosario de la Frontera

is a tiny place among big estancias - farms with fruit trees and vegetables. People actually use horses for transport here. This is how the wild west in USA must have looked some time ago. In Bolivia and here I see many stores with horseback-riding equipment - beautiful, ornamented saddles, all kinds of shoes, blankets, sacks, etc. It's the land of the gaucho - the cowboy. 5 km from the bus station in Rosario is Hotel Termal. It's a huge old hotel build on a hot spring. It looks like the hotel from "Shining" except it is old and has deliciously old feel to it: peeling paint in some places, beautiful old tiles, a huge dining room for what seems like a hundred people with huge windows overlooking a big park and fields in the distance. The hotel is also a spa but in an old meaning of the word. It resembles the old spas - sanatorium - in Poland. I don't very much like the modern beauty spas but I love old medicinal spas. This one is like it. It's for people of all ages and both genders. There are deck chairs everywhere and mineral water (to cure different ailments) in jars for all-day drinking. I arrived in the morning and the spa services were so inexpensive that I decided to try everything on the list. I first went to the outside swimming pool with water greasy with minerals and 30 degrees Celsius hot. It was heavenly... Then I went to one-person jacuzzi bath with even greasier water. Then a break for natural juices and rest on a deck chair in one of the "galerias" overlooking the park. Then a face massage with hydrating masks and lotions and aromatherapy. Then a mud bath. The mud was stninky and I found all kinds of stones and twigs in it. It was very brown and also greasy, plop, plop. I fell asleep in it... After every treatment I was lied down, wrapped in towels and blankets for rest. And the last one and the best was an orintal massage. Mario, the massur, also has energy in his hands and I could immediately feel it. He too, like the Shaman, immediately knew about my third chakra problems and part of the massage was to energize the third chakra. I didn't think highly about massages because my previous experience was not good but this one was out of this world. It seems for the massage to be beneficial it is necessary to find a really good masseur - one who treats the massage as energy for body and mind, not just for the body. There was no vacant room at the hotel - there was some kind of convention scheduled for the evening and it was packed - so I decided to go to Tucuman in the evening. I went to the bus station and spend two hours talking with wonderful persons who were working at the bus station and who sold me the ticket: Liliana and her two-month old son Geronimo, Monica and Ivan. The baby goes everywhere with his mom and is also taken care of by Monica and Ivan when they all work together. We asked someone to take a picture of all of us so you will see it when I put all the pictures on the web one day. I hope to pass through Rosario again one day and visit them all.

I got to Tucuman at 1 am and got into Argentina Norte hostel which is located in a beautiful old house. I can't believe how wonderful the architecture is here. The rooms have really high celeings and part of the corridor is not roofed. This is what I like - you feel you are always outside. But that is possible in a climate like this, when it never really gets cold. Now it's "winter" so it's pleasantly cool. It's raining today. I feel so relaxed after all the treatments I got yesterday that I am in a "liquid" state, totally spaced out... I rolled out of bed at 1 pm, eate breakfast at 2 and walked around the main square. I saw an amazing courtyard at the San Francisco church (I think no one had such good effect on architecture as admirers of Saint Francisco) but very briefly because the church was closing for siesta. Details will come later then.