Wanderings: A Travel Journal

It’s been a while since my last post, mostly because we haven’t been anywhere in the past two weeks nearly as captivating as Valparaíso, and because I’ve been pretty busy this week taking Spanish classes in Córdoba, losing my credit card, trying to book a trip to Antarctica, etc.

The day after my last post, we left Santiago after a brief stay and took our second trip over the Andes in as many weeks. This one wasn’t as spectacular as the first but was still quite impressive, and we emerged on the other side back in Argentina and in the city of Mendoza. Mendoza itself doesn’t really have many (any?) major tourist sights, but it is a surprisingly pleasant place, well laid out, with shady, tree-lined streets, sidewalk cafes and restaurants, and a slow pace vibe. We only stayed long enough to do the almost obligatory wine tour in the vineyards outside town, where 70 per cent of all Argentine wine is produced. We stopped at two bodegas (a small, family-run one and a larger, commercial one), a family olive oil factory, and an liquor-making house, where the tasting of the alcoholic chocolate mint drink was so good that we had no choice but to buy a bottle to take with us.

Heading north (as part of our rather unusual route that is supposed to be leading us south), we stayed a couple of nights in the town of Alta Gracia, where Che Guevara lived as a boy. His house is now a museum, and we stayed next door to it with an Argentine poet and his Cuban wife, who have turned their house into a restaurant for the museum visitors and also rent out a couple of rooms. After staying in hostels for the previous week or so, it was nice to enjoy the quirky atmosphere of a poet’s house for a couple of nights. The museum itself is well done and worth a visit, especially for Che aficionados like me. The other highlight of Alta Gracia is a Jesuit estancia complex in the centre of town, featuring a church, two open courtyards, a smithy, various residential halls etc. We liked the small-town atmosphere and good food and spent two relaxing days in Alta Gracia preparing ourselves for the upcoming week in Córdoba.

Córdoba itself is an OK place, with a few nice colonial buildings (though no ‘stunning’ ones as described by LP) and a lot more ugly, brick high-rises. With seven universities and a strong Jesuit history, it’s one of the main learning centres of Argentina and I decided to comply. Having been pretty discouraged by my level of Spanish comprehension at the wine tour in Mendoza, I decided to take a week of classes in Córdoba to help my on my way to the ever-elusive level of fluency that I’m aiming for – in all, 15 hours of one-on-one lessons spread over five days. I’m really glad I did it, as I learned a lot and now pretty much know all the grammar that I need to know – I just need to put it all together and improve my vocabulary and everything should be fine. In the meantime, there’s no rest for the wicked, as I’m reading my first real Spanish book and loving it – the first volume of the fantasy trilogy Memorías de Idhún, and my pseudo-Spanish-teachers from afar, Ben and Marina, are launching Notes in Spanish Gold on Monday which could keep me busy for a while!

After my last class this afternoon, we’re taking an overnight bus to the Peninsula Valdés, our first taste of Patagonia, where we’re expecting to see whales as well as penguins with (hopefully) very newborn chicks. After that it’s onto the Fitzroy region and the first of several long treks.

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 close to being “one of the most spectacular you are ever likely to undertake” as the hyperbole of Lonely Planet had promised. (For what it’s worth, I’d say there are several more beautiful road journeys in northwest Argentina alone.) 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.

After 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.

Returning 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.

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 ... [Continue reading this entry]