The Train In The Clouds

A week ago I went on a very exciting train ride.  It was called 'tren a las nubes', which means 'the train in the clouds'.  It's so high you can sometimes see clouds underneath the bridges that the train crosses over!

Tren A Las Nubes going over a bridge

My train ride started in a place called Salta, in northwest Argentina.  It's quite desert-like here and I saw lots of cacti from the train.  They are very tall spiky plants that live in deserts.

Salta is about a thousand metres higher than the level of the sea.  From Salta station, the train went up a mountain until we were over four thousand metres above sea level!  There isn't much oxygen in the air at that height so an ambulance drove along beside the train in case any of the passengers found it hard to breath.

It's very difficult for trains to go up steep slopes so the train had to go round the hill in spirals for part of the journey.  It also went up two zig-zags - it went along the 'zig', then stopped and had to reverse up the 'zag', then it stopped and went forward again.  It's a bit complicated!  You'd have to be a very good engineer to build a train line like that as it's much much steeper than the Lickey Hills!

Me peeping out of the window as the train goes round a bend

I spent the whole day on the train and looked out of the window all the way at the view.  We didn't get back to Salta until 11 o' clock at night, by which time I was a very tired stuffed traveller!

Since my train ride I've been on a very exciting expedition but I'll tell you about that in my next blog post.  I hope you're looking forward to it!