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Northwest Argentina: “don’t tie your horse in the plaza”

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Fortunately, our travels in northwest Argentina in the past week have proved more successful than our previous foray into the northeast. The northwest is a charming, indigenous land a world away from the pace of Buenos Aires; to me it feels like a mixture of the Mexican Bajío (the colonial towns, the local music) and the Bolivian Altiplano (the llamas, the indigenous people, and some of the landscape), with some Midwestern United States thrown in for good measure (in the red rock canyons). Our regional travels have been in Salta and Jujuy provinces, the latter being quite close to both the Bolivian and Chilean borders.

We began in the city of Salta, which is no match for some of the gorgeous colonial towns of Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, etc, but is enjoyable enough, with a couple of pretty churches and a decent central plaza (called Plaza 9 de Julio, like so many others in Argentina; in my experience elsewhere in Latin America they’re usually called the Plaza Mayor or the Plaza de Armas). The colonial ambience aside, the other highlight of Salta was the ‘High Mountain Archaeological Museum’, which contains three child mummies aged six, seven and 15 who were put in a rock enclosure and left to die 500 years ago near the peak of a sacred 6700m+ volcano as a sacrifice, and only discovered during an expedition in 1999. Only one is displayed at a time (they are rotated every few months), and we saw the seven-year-old girl, extraordinarily well preserved because of the low temperatures, with a deliberately deformed skull and features like hair and teeth still as visible as if she had died yesterday.

We used Salta as our base for further exploration into the eponymous province, which included the Valles Calchaquiés and the Quebrada de Cafayate. The former is a plateau 2000m above sea level, about four hours from Salta on a road that was scenic but not as beautiful as it was hyped up to be. In the valley we visited two small towns, Cachi and Molinos, enjoying the colonial chic-boutique atmosphere of the former and the off-the-beaten-track nature of the latter. Both were noteworthy for their adobe architecture, pretty churches and cactus-wood decorations and ceilings, and for their diminutive size – Cachi has about 2000 inhabitants and Molinos about 900, so this was really small-town Argentina, and we were glad to have experienced it.

Garganta del DiabloAfter a couple of nights in the Valles Calchaquiés, we returned to Salta and headed south through the Quebrada de Cafayate (now that was a spectacular ride) and disembarked mid-canyon to see two famous gashes in the rock that produce small canyons-within-a-canyon: the Garganta del Diablo (the Devil’s Throat; I’m beginning to realise that every other province in Argentina contains something with this name) and the Anfiteatro (Amphitheatre), the more impressive of the two. We brought our tent with the intention to camp nearby for the night and return to Salta in the morning. With only rocky ground near the road and sandy ground near the river that runs through the canyon to choose from, we picked the latter but found that the pegs wouldn’t hold and, as such, we couldn’t pitch the tent. Instead, we laid it out on the ground and put our sleeping mats and sleeping bags on top, and enjoyed a lovely and fortunately balmy evening sleeping under the Southern Hemisphere stars, which confused my Northern Hemisphere wife quite considerably.

Cerro de los Siete ColoresReturning once more to Salta, we picked up the rest of our stuff from the hostel and took a bus further north to Jujuy province, bypassing the eponymous capital and heading straight for the Quebrada de Humahuaca, which was recommended to us many years ago and for good reason: the extraordinary colours of the rocks here have made the canyon the highlight of northwest Argentina for us. From the window of our hospedaje in Purmamarca we can see the Cerro de los Siete Colores (the Hill of the Seven Colours), and though I’m having a bit of trouble tracking down all seven, I can at least see brilliant oranges intertwined with whites, deep purples and ochre reds – all combining to make a pretty spectacular scene. We walked a 3km circuit around the hill yesterday morning on a glorious day and the contrast of the colours was really fabulous, so much so that we walked it again in the afternoon (but there were some clouds about and the light was not as good).

Finally, I’d better explain the title of this post. We saw a sign in the central plaza of a small town we passed on the bus en route to the Valles Calchaquiés that said: ‘Prohibido atar caballos alrededor de la plaza’ (‘Tying up horses in the plaza is prohibited’) – which we thought was an apt summary of the timelessness of the region. Now, having seen and done everything we wanted to do in this area, we’re taking a bus to San Pedro de Atacama tomorrow for our first exploration of Chile, and then we’ll cross back and forth between the two countries over the coming weeks as we head south and eventually arrive in Patagonia.

Suddenly: Argentina

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

The upheaval of the week after my last post seems distant now, but it was pretty chaotic at the time and I didn’t have a chance to post about it while it was happening. To cut a long story short, two weeks ago we tried and failed on a Monday to postpone our Friday flight to Buenos Aires; flew from Riga to Rome on Tuesday; Wendy changed airports straight away and flew to Geneva for a meeting on Wednesday, returning to Rome that night; and in the end we took the Argentina flight anyway and by Friday night we found ourselves in the welcoming apartment of our friends Seb and Diana, not exactly sure how we had gotten there or what lay ahead of us in our attempt to ‘complete’ the South American continent that we abandoned midway through Bolivia four years ago to take jobs in Doha.

We spent five days in Buenos Aires, but we had quite a few things to buy, we wanted to spend time with our friends and relax a bit, so we didn’t spend as much time exploring the city for pleasure as we would have liked. We spent half a day in San Telmo for its Sunday market, enjoying the street tango, puppet shows etc, and visited the Plaza de Mayo and around. Beyond that we didn’t see that much of the city, but we know we’ll be back in due time anyway as it’s sort of the crux of this South America trip – I have a flight to Vancouver from B.A. at the end of January, and if we’re able to return after that and last until the middle of next year we still have our return flight to Rome from Buenos Aires in June.

From the capital we took an overnight bus to Puerto Iguazu, and even though we bought the cheapest tickets (for class semi cama, or semi-bed), it was the most luxurious bus I’ve been on in 70+ countries. You get served food on board (while DVDs of 1980s music, a throwback to our time in the Philippines, are shown on the numerous televisions), there’s an exceptionally clean bathroom, and the seats recline a fair way – it’s basically the equivalent of business class on a plane.

The Iguazu Falls that straddle the Argentine-Brazilian border are generally considered the most impressive waterfalls in the world, but unfortunately our visit was a pretty massive disappointment. It rained and hailed (yet again) on the day we went to the Brazilian side of the falls and had been raining the previous several days, leaving us with poor visibility (sometimes we would look out from a viewpoint and literally not be able to see the falls at all), and the water completely brown (think of the waterfall at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory). We went to the Argentine side the next day, but the Garganta del Diabo (Devil’s Throat) lookout point – the biggest highlight of both sides of the falls – was closed because of high water levels. The boat trip on the river below the falls to a small island was also cancelled for the same reason, so in the end we didn’t even bother entering since there was not much else left to see and we knew we would be bitterly disappointed again.

We left Iguazu on Monday, stopping briefly at San Ignacio to see the ruins of a Jesuit mission in the jungle. These centuries-old missions are scattered throughout the region in modern-day Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and while the best ones are said to be in Paraguay, we both need visas to enter and figured it wouldn’t be worth the $90. San Ignacio is considered the best of the four missions in Argentina, and we thought it was quite interesting and well worth the stopover.

Getting back on another insane luxury bus in the afternoon, we journeyed out of the northeast of Argentina to the completely different landscapes of the northwest, and 19 hours later found ourselves in our current location, the colonial town of Salta, which will be our base for exploring the colourful rock formations and indigenous villages of the region over the next few days. Though, since some New Zealanders we became friends with at the hostel last night got robbed this morning by an Argentine staying in their dorm, it hasn’t been an auspicious start…

Lithuania: Vilnius, Trakai and a picnic at Stalin World

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

TrakaiVilnius is harder to characterise than the two other Baltic capitals. It doesn’t have a medieval core – it’s instead a baroque city with the occasional medieval building or, more frequently, newer buildings ... [Continue reading this entry]

Estonia: The glorious medieval city of Tallinn

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

The old city of Riga was certainly nice enough, but had it not marked our first steps in Europe for over a year, we probably wouldn’t have been greatly impressed – there were no city walls or gates, ... [Continue reading this entry]