Salta, Jujuy and Bolivia

I´m now in the white city of Sucre, ready after two false starts to finally begin tomorrow some work out in the countryside.  As far as I can work out, I will be putting the finishing touches to a hacienda, half an hour from the city, before the British owners begin to run the place as a B&B. Having been promised beautiful scenery, glorious night skies and the chance for this hopeless townie to learn some genuine practical skills, I´ve been looking forward to this for weeks. Obliged to fit in a decent stint of work here before arriving in Peru to teach by the end of May, I´d been wary of taking too long over my journey North from Mendoza. I therefore gave the beautiful North of Argentina only a week, and by the time I´d had an inauspicious start in Bolivia I was already thinking that had been too much of a rush. Said beginning had me shackled to Sucre for two weeks anyway, although fortunately that´s not been too much of a chore.

Salta 1 Apr

Despite Argentina´s reputation (and price) for comfortable buses, faulty air conditioning meant that I spent the baking hot 18hr journey to Salta not only hungover as sin, but with smoke curling out of the vent above my head (as well as my ears). The Sunday of my arrival preceded the ´Malvinas Liberacion´ bank holiday, so after my day of sightseeing (one pretty colonial building after another, the pavement-pounding interspersed with breaks in shaded plazas) the streets were filled with people out for the night. Salta is famous for its ´peñas´ – Argentinian folk music+dancing performances. Having arrived at a block lined with bars, each chock-full of people, we picked a door and headed in. Possibly the wrong one, but the tackily glitzy show was still good fun: I won´t be buying any Argentinian folk music CDs, but twirling skirts and scarves made the dancing theatrical enough.

Provincia de Jujuy 2-7 Apr

After Salta I headed up to San Salvador de Jujuy to catch up with some ´old friends´: two of the girls who´d hosted me in Córdoba were back in the family nest for Semana Santa (Easter week). A couple of nights in a proper ´home´, with the charming and warm family, were a hugely appreciated chance to pause and get my breath back. My tour guide(s) took me to the Termas de Reyes to swim in the warm spring water, and a visit to the city museum allowed me to start to put stories to a few of the street names I´d seen in each Argentinian city. Each feature the same set of thoroughfares named after one of numerous ´libertadores´ and other national heroes; occasionally leading to confusion when you try to remember if your hostel was on Avenida San Martin in this city or the last. More research is needed to decide who of Lavalle or Rosas was the goody (that apparently depends on which side you were on for the civil war – Rosas if you like a winner), but at least I now know they weren´t mates.

Continuing the metaphor of anthropomorphic landscapes, my journey up the Quebrada de Humahuaca saw the scenery literally waving at me: now in Wild West country, the hillsides were lined with the classic three-pointed cacti . My trusty tent (picked up and carried for three nearly months from Buenos Aires) got its final outing in Purmamarca, where I got up at first light to watch the sun rising over the spectacular cerro de siete colores. In hindsight, I´m not convinced it actually looked any better at the crack of dawn, but watching the shadows roll their way down the technicolour mountain was certainly dramatic.

Next stop was Tilcara, for an afternoon´s gorge(ous)-walking and a return route presenting a beautiful view of the valley and the town. Journeys within the 40km quebrada were a real treat, with the rugged hillsides boxing in the buses as they made their way along the valley floor. I´d been tipped to go to the achingly picturesque village of Iruya; for which the buses then had to climb 1000m up and out of the valley, stop for a breather (and some photos) at the summit (at the border between Salta and Jujuy), before winding back down the next valley on dirt roads. The trip and the views were stunning, up to and including the first glimpse of the town, tucked in amongst the gorge walls by the river. With the journey having been further enhanced by the atmosphere generated by a great bunch of folk on the bus, I was already regretting my decision not to stay a night there when I left my camera on the return bus. 

Having always considered picture-taking more of a chore than a pleasure, I´m not one of those tourists who´d regard that loss as earth-shattering. I am already enjoying the sense of liberation that comes with being able to drink in views without feeling obliged to put a lens in the way. But with my own idiocy to blame, and the nagging feeling that I could/should have taken more time over my journey, I couldn´t help but kick myself up to La Quiaca and the border with Bolivia.

Tupiza and Sucre (7-22 Apr)

I therefore viewed my crossing over to Villazon as a fresh start, and the opportunity to forget about those regrets and concentrate on enjoying a new country. Growing six inches by walking over the frontier (Bolivians are short) certainly helped, as did meeting up with a lovely British couple on the train journey to Tupiza, who ended up staying in the same hotel as me. Outdoors hub Tupiza acts as start point either for explorations of the beautiful local countryside, or for journeys through otherworldly altiplano landscapes (volcanoes, multi-coloured lagoons and salt flats) up to Uyuni. My plan was to spend a day or two exploring Tupiza´s surrounds, while looking for some nice people to spend 4 days in a jeep with on the way up to Uyuni. I was well over halfway through both objectives, when my trying to find a way up a nearby hill (for a view over Tupiza) put a spanner in the works.

My route to the hills took me through some scrappy suburbs at the edge of the town, and it was while following a (relatively) promising-looking path that three big black dogs ran barking out of the ramshackle houses. Dogs, whether street dogs or pets (it´s hard to tell which are which), are everywhere in South America, and many will run up to within a couple of metres, barking loudly until you´ve moved on and out of their ´territory´. Sadly these bastards didn´t, running out to fill the path behind me and then carrying on. I´d been knocked to my knees once, taken several bites and was definitely losing by the time their owners, drawn by the barking and my panicked cries for help, arrived to drag them off. Significantly kindlier than their dogs, the family dusted me down, showed me the route I should have taken (I´ll know for the next time but won´t bother – the easily accessible Corazon de Jesús, within town, has views plenty good enough) and wished me luck with getting medical treatment.

So I spent my Easter Sunday afternoon heading to Bolivian A & E with my Spanish dictionary. ´Festive opening hours´ meant that treatment was limited to cleaning out my wounds, and I was told to head to a different hospital the next day to sort out rabies vaccinations and antibiotics. Bolivia turns out to be a pretty cheap place to get bitten by a dog (not that I´d recommend it), with my prescribed course of rabies vaccinations paid for by the state. Frustratingly, the course consists of ten shots, the first seven administered daily, which ended my hopes of doing the salar tour to Uyuni (now added to the already-lengthy list of things to do “la proxima vez” I´m on this continent). And they didn´t they have the vaccines in stock in Tupiza, necessitating I travel on to Sucre to start getting jabbed.

So I headed to Bolivia´s constitutional capital (it´s NOT La Paz, as the tour guide in the city museum vehemently explained) much like any other tourist: off to visit lots of grandiose white buildings. Only in my case, specifically hospitals. As well as taking on(in?) all the precautionary needles, the other task has been to get the heart rate down at each dog sighting – in Sucre, just as in every city, the blasted things are everywhere. My rehabilitation on that front got off to a pretty intensive start, with a particularly friendly alsation-cross following me to my first doctor´s appointment. It´s hard to tell a dog that he´s caught you at a bad time, meaning that I had canine company for my whole twenty minute walk to the hospital. A guy in the street asked me if the dog was mine, only to be told by a nearby shopkeeper that ´nah, he´s just the dog that follows gringos´. Sangrienta típica. Whilst I´d entertain hopes of escape every time my new friend paused to scratch himself, or go nose-to-tail with other dogs; in no time at all he´d be back, trotting along at my heels. Often literally: the touch of paw on the back of my flip-flops causing me to jump six feet in the air. Fortunately I did arrive at the end of a nerve-shredding walk in significantly better shape than my breakfast empanada. Whilst I still give each dog I see a second glance, Sucre´s ´gringo dog´ certainly helped.

The sheer number of dogs means that bites aren’t uncommon: within a few days of my own misadventure I’d already met four others who’d been bitten by man’s supposed best friends. Frustratingly, while I was committing myself to Sucre to get something done about it, each of the others had done sod all and are still drawing breath. Oh well. Sadly lacking ahead of the event, I’d also soon received, from numerous sources, plentiful advice on how to deal with aggressive perros. Apparently the local trick is to pick up a stone and shape to throw it, which will cause any number of the beasts to run away with their tails between their legs. I´ve seen the tactic in action since, and can testify to its effectiveness: the folk at the Lonely Planet need to make some urgent revisions.

Fortunately Sucre isn’t a bad place to kick your heels: the former colonial capital is a very pretty city, and its tranquil charm, abundance of cheap Spanish schools, and beautiful setting (being able to look out of the city and see mountains is a pretty big tick in my book. Sucre´s surrounded by them) have been sufficient to convince a number of gringos (for some reason, most of them Dutch) ´here for a week or so´ to stay on for months or years. Taking my lifetime total of comedy injuries to four has therefore provided me with the opportunity to brush up on my Spanish (and learn some interesting new medical vocabulary), visit some (varyingly) interesting museums and go out for meals with the ´expat community´.

I encountered this motley crew of Dutch, Australian and Austrian travellers/aid volunteers/dossers through the guy who’d answered my plea on couchsurfing : “can anyone recommend me a good hospital?”. A local tour operator, he was fortunately coerced by the gang into leading a two-day hike to a nearby meteor crater. With legs now recovering by the end of the week, it would have taken wild horses to keep me away, and the ten of us had a fantastic weekend´s walking. The Saturday night’s entertainment was provided by the Tarijan wine (Bolivia´s are allegedly the highest vineyards in the world) and Bolivian tequila we´d carried along the way. The latter, combined with our guide’s history with one of the Dutch girls, led to tears before bed time and our Fearless Leader storming off into the night with his tent. Fortunately for our prospects of making it home, we found him the next morning, and with the previous night´s drama forgotten, set happily to climbing out of the crater. Our route from Maragua to Potolo took in yet more beautiful scenery, and also some dinosaur footprints, set into the rock millennia ago and only recently revealed by rainfall. Our journey home was in the back of a cattle truck, with sacks of potatoes for seats and a sheep for a company. Bolivian hiking is awesome.

So despite the inauspicious start, I´ve quickly got to like Bolivia. The people are friendly, with most offering a word or two of greeting on passing you in the street, and by God it´s cheap here. Probably of greater immediate risk to my health than the dogs is the preponderance of tasty food (most of it either deep-fried, or some form of cake) available for a few bolivianos (i.e. about 50p) at every street corner. Allied to innate greed and gastronomic curiosity, feeling sorry for myself and needing to ´get my strength up´ (for my upcoming physical labour) have been compelling excuses to try every delicacy going. At least twice. I´ve also spiralled headlong into sorry addiction to the produce of one of Bolivia´s huge native industries. No, not cocaine: chocolate. Having missed out during Easter, discovering Bolivia makes their own stuff has had me indulging in several feeding frenzies of my own. The lady in the chocolate shop already recognises me, and I´ve pretty much established a ´usual´.

 I’ve paid the predictable price for such excess, with a stint of food poisoning further delaying my arrival at the hacienda. Cheap as this place is, the sheer gluttony means my wallet will be glad of a break when I finally escape into the country. Particularly as I´m now off antibiotics I desperately need to work, and nearing the end of a (well, nearly) dry fortnight. With escape beckoning, and the promise of some sense of purpose again, I cannae wait…

Football, Hills and Vino

I´m now in Sucre, Bolivia, having spent about a week each in Córdoba and Mendoza before travelling North to the border through Salta and Jujuy. Needing to arrive here in time to begin some work out in the sticks (before needing to head off again for a different job in Peru) inspired something of a rush through some genuinely beautiful parts of the world; and my so far mixed fortune in Bolivia has had me slightly ruing that haste. Details will follow, but having struggled to keep up with the blog I´ll content myself for now with summarising the highlights of my journey up to N Argentina:

Football in Rosario (18-20 Mar)

The match of my penultimate day in Rosario lived well up to expectations. Raucous chanting continued, impressively, from first to final whistle; with terrace-long banners and firecrackers providing the entertainment before and after the game. The football didn´t quite live up to the crowd´s passion: Lionel Messi´s former team could only manage a 1-0 victory over recently promoted Atletica Rafaela, although had Newell´s two strikers not squandered countless one-on-ones, the scoreline would have been more impressive. However, the atmosphere and such a comically inept forward display were enough to persuade to adopt a new team, and I am now a leper for life. After trawling the unofficial street vendors on my final afternoon, I eventually found an affordable pair of team shorts with NOB embroidered on them (it seemed funny at the time), and can now proudly wear my new allegiance on my, err, thigh. Job done.

I then left Rosario literally under a cloud, with a heavy thunderstorm making my departure more-than-flatteringly dramatic. I found saying goodbye to the hostel crew more emotional than expected (have missed them, and particularly being told I´m beautiful by Brayan on a near-daily basis), and the weather served to further complicate leaving Rosario. The sheer volume of water meant that I arrived at the train station with about two inches of water for company in the floor of my cab. I was confused when the train guard said to expect departure at about 8am rather than the 3am journey I´d booked, but a glance at the now-submerged track revealed why. After a month of stifling heat and sunshine, the apocalyptic weather prompted me to look up the Spanish for ´bloody typical´ (Google says ´sangrienta típica´, if anyone´s interested). Having cheerfully contemplated the prospect of having to sleep on train platforms before I left home, I duly set to it, although I hadn´t before envisioned actually having a train to wait for.

Architecture and Hills in Córdoba (20-25 Mar)

Staying a block from the jaw-droppingly beautiful Los Capuchinos church, as well as the nightly sound and light shows at the Buen Pastor fountains, was a real treat. I did however, spend a good deal of time in the city of Córdoba trying to get out of it, heading out for walks in the beautiful countryside. I visited pretty Alta Gracia, where I enjoyed the irony of being priced out of the Che Guevara museum; instead visiting the highly-informative Jesuit museum before strolling up to the impressively adorned Lady-of-Lourdes sanctuary. Convents or religious monuments seemed to occupy the choicest spots in many of these small towns, and visiting one (after a trip to yet another waterfall) in Tanti allowed me my first glimpse of a condor. The nun I was chatting to said it was only a small one, but the huge wings looked impressive enough to me.

My trip the next day to see yet more at the Quebrada del Condoritos (an 800m deep crack in the sierras where the brutes give birth to their young) proved to be a real treat. A glorious undulating walk brought us to the top of the gorge, where we could see pairs and more of the magnificent things spiralling their way up and out into the sierras. We´d started too late in the day to have time to climb down and see them up close, but being too far away to make out their comically ugly heads may well have been for the better. I could spout clichés about the thrill of seeing them in flight, but will content myself to say that after seeing many more whilst working my way up the Andes; the sight of yet another big black shadow rolling over the ground, and the glance up to see the massive black-and-white wings still gives me a buzz.

As if I´d needed any more convincing that couchsufing was the way to travel, it had come in the form of an invitation from a beautiful girl in Córdoba containing the phrase “I live with my three sisters”. Staying with the family allowed me a number of opportunities to sit in on Spanish conversations, although a good deal of them ´soared majestically´ over my head. They were a lovely bunch, and a resultant boyish crush (given me, probably just the result of being fed for four days) made for some difficult goodbyes from Córdoba too.

Wine and Mountains in Mendoza (26 - 31 Mar)

While the view on bus journeys in the East of Argentina had been fairly unexciting (the flat pampas merely scratching its navel and staring back), the rolling hills near Córdoba had been much more friendly. The Andes though, glimpsed from within Mendoza, gave a definite saucy wink. Whilst conscious that a long day´s solo walk is not a good way to go about forgetting a girl, the chance to actually indulge in a love proved irresistible (to be ever-so-slightly melodramatic). I therefore took on the 10km wind from Las Cuevas up to the Libertadores pass on the border with Chile. Beginning the 1km high climb in stunning scenery, with initially just mountain hares and eagles for company, I arrived at the top to come face to face with Jesus Christ. The statue of Christ the Redeemer has been there since 1904, overseeing the peace at the historically fractious border (apparently without complete success – he must have nodded off). After commiserating him on his, by now, no doubt aching arms, I agreed he´d picked a fantastic spot but suggested he could have picked a better angle to overlook. The views all around were splendid: although the High Andes are desert, with not even patchy vegetation, the snow-capped peaks and multicoloured mountains are still breathtaking (and at 4,000m, literally so).

Though conscious of the altitude, the temptation to run down the descents proved overwhelming. Letting the legs play out, with the slope falling away behind and the valley rushing up to meet me, led to moments of sheer, exhilarating glee. Having had plenty of fun whilst remaining gratifyingly headache free, I called it a day about 3/4 of the way down, thumbing a ride from one of the tourist buses (cheats) to the Aconcagua viewpoint. Framed by a perfect U-shaped valley (formed by glaciation, a fact sadly pointed out by a helpful plaque rather than my nascent Geography GCSE), the view of the South face of the snow-capped, jagged beast of a mountain was pretty spectacular. His neighbours are pretty dramatic-looking too. I´ve now said this of a couple of places since, but the High Andean scenery is like nothing I´ve ever seen before. It´s algo más, and left this wee gringo, far from home, giggling to himself in sheer, awestruck wonder.

The other must-do in Mendoza is wine. A bike tour round the bodegas in Maipú is a well-established favourite on the gringo trail, and I was fortunate to be able to go for one in the company of former university friend and fellow Physics-sufferer, Phil “me up” Howes (Phil´s travels down from Venezuala are entertainingly documented here). Pedalling along past the vines, with the mountains in the background, made for a cracking day out. As too did taking in a glass or few of wine. I´ve never before tried a number of different grapes against each other, and being able to start building up some cross references for the palate made for a genuinely educational afternoon. It made for a good deal of fun too, and we wobbled back to the bike hire place to take in yet more, and this time free of charge. My first real experience thus far of the full-on backpacker scene continued with our crashing the all-you-can-eat asado at the hostel of a fellow ´cyclist´ we´d met along the way. That proved to be an excellent idea, although my partaking in the free tequila ´happy hour´ (lean back over the bar and open wide) was definitely not. My idiocy in returning for another shot (I´m a sucker for free booze) meant leaving Mendoza for Salta the next morning was another painful departure.