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…
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