Red & Yellow & ...

Puerto Iguazu :: Argentina

I haven't had a good human sacrifice story in ages.

Places: Salta, Quebrada de Humahuaca & Quebrada de Cafayate.

Coolest thing I did: Three words - Red. Wine. IceCream.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Llamas will hold still long enough to take a picture of with self portrait mode on your new camera. Man I love my new camera.

The most stark different I found coming from the flatlands of central Argentina up to Salta was to find just how different the people are physically in the North. The Incas made it this far south and everyone looks a lot like they do (or so The Discovery Channel tells me) in Peru and Bolivia. There is a much stronger native influence in the gene pool than is evident in places further south, with people being shorter, broader, darker and having almost Asian eyes as a result of the Americas being peopled by dudes walking across the Bearing Straight during the last ice age from Mongolia. For the first time in South America I felt that same kind of traditional culture that was so prevalent in Southern Mexico and Guatemala, even if the locals will be the first to tell you not much of that traditional culture remains.

The town of Salta itself is set in a river valley and is surrounded on all sides by green mountains, a contrast yet again with both Patagonia and Mendoza. It has it’s standard square, bloke on horse, church and town hall so as a result I didn’t plan on spending a whole lot of time in town. The rain on the first day forced me to do more of it that I had planned, and it turned out to be quite a stroke of luck. The one museum I went to on the town square had the remains of children that had been sacrificed by the Incas, and because those wacky Incas sacrificed their children by getting them smashed on booze and then putting them on top of really high mountains, those kids are nearly intact. In 1999 some archaeologists found 3 bodies on top of a volcano that had been there for over 500 years and all 3 are in near mint condition, with the exception of one young girl who was struck by lightning sometime since and shows the burn marks. They rotate the mummies on display so only one is on display at a time, but it is seriously eerie that you’re looking into the face of someone that looks like they could have been alive a week ago.

It’s very hard to work out exactly why the Incas were sacrificing these children, apparently something to do with bonding disparate parts of the empire together or some such, but the English translation seemed to be one page to every 5 of Spanish so I think they might have been skipping large parts of the story.

In order to get out of Salta by Friday and onto a plane for Iguazu to see the falls I sent myself on a gruelling 48 hours of day trips, which are generally my least favourite things in the world. I didn’t really get to experience much of Salta’s nightlife simply because I was getting up at 7am every morning to go somewhere. My first day was out into the Quebrada de Humahuaca (I think that means gorge, or valley?) which involves going down into a gorge where the erosion has exposed multi-coloured stone and then locals have gone and built their villages in the shadow of these technicolour mountains making them lovely places for tourists to stop and take pictures of. They also all have town squares, churches and town halls for you to pretend to be interested in, and various knickknacks you probably should buy for people at home to pretend to like and then stick in shoe boxes at the bottom of their closets.

Now I love quaint native cultures as much as the next Western Imperialist but I’ve documented in many places before how much I find the Disney-fication of these places at best uninteresting. From the hand woven llama poncho I’d never wear to the blokes playing the pan pipes while you’re having lunch I get the feeling I’m not their target market. The most interesting conversation I had with a local was probably the guide, who comes from one of the villages but moved to Salta because that’s where all the jobs are. That circular situation where people are keeping their local traditions alive simply so the tourists can feel they’ve seen something authentic kind of makes no sense to me. These guys wouldn’t be living in adobe huts and trying to hide their satellite dishes from view if we didn’t pay to go and see them living like it was pre-Colombian days.

Yep, for me it was all about the scenery, and it’s simply one of those unique places in the world. The various hues come from such phenomena as fossilised algae (green) to oxidised iron (red) to make, in some places cliff faces showing seven different contrasting colours. Even the subtle colour change between the late morning when we were driving into the gorges and late afternoon when we were coming back meant you constantly got a different palate to look at. If it was up to me we could have spent all day in the gorge and far less time in reconstructed Inca ruins, eating llama meatloaf or the half hour in Jujuy on the way back to see yet another town hall, even if this one did have a rather cool French Baroque feel to it and independent Argentina’s first flag in it’s front room.

My other day trip was to Cafayate, which is Argentina’s other major wine region, even if it is dwarfed massively by Mendoza. Again, the best part of the day is going through the almost desert landscape of the Quebrada de Cafayate, which we did far more stopping at and photographing than the day before. You’re constantly being told this formation is an iguana, and this one is a frog, but my favourites were the big dramatic ones, like the two dry waterfalls The Devils Throat & The Amphitheatre. The latter is even cooler because you can walk right inside and find acoustics so good that some of Argentina’s best loved musicians (I’m told) have played there. You got the feeling this is true as there were some buskers taking advantage of the many, many tour buses by playing right in the middle to make the most of the sound. I wondered how it would have gone down had I bought one of those pan pipes and played the first 3 bars of Three Blind Mice (the only music I actually know) repeatedly.

I have to grind an axe with the wineries I’ve so far been to in Argentina. Does no one understand that when you get a lot of white people in you may have the best marketing opportunity you could possibly have? Why on earth bring out your bottom of the barrel wines and treat everyone like some criminal that’s out to eat into your profit margin by drinking a thimble of your wine? Seriously, it should be a cost of doing business. Not one of the wine’s I’ve had so far would have been something I’d actively go looking for, but I also guess that might be because the servers somehow have the art of making half a bottle stretch to 40 people and despite selling wine that costs 100 pesos a bottle you’re serving the stuff that cost 18 in the supermarket. Even if most people are tourists who can’t tell their wines apart and will never remember the name anyway, what’s that compared to the 1% who might know what they are talking about (I’m not in that category, by the way) and might buy a whole case right there.

When I’m in charge, things will be different.

So the thing that Cafayate had going for it that was kind of unique was the heladeria (or ice-cream parlour, gringo) that made red and white wine ice cream. There are several places that now sell a wine based ice cream in Cafayate, but the original isn’t easy to miss – they literally only sell it out of a window that is lined with the reviews from the Lonely Planet, Rough Guide and other travel guides blown up in 40 point font. Strangely enough the LP reviews were in French, German and Spanish, but not English. Anyway, the woman will give you a scoop of Torrontes & Cabernet ice cream, and from the first taste you can tell there is a whole crapload of actual wine in there. I’d say if you’d opted for the 1kg tub you’d be fairly sure you wouldn’t be driving home afterwards.

The way back was almost a write off, after a couple of wine tastings, lunch and wine icecream it was about 5 mins out of town before the whole bus was asleep. The only thing that actually got us all out of the bus on the final stop of the day was the excited squeal of the 9 year old girl who had spent the whole day doing grown up stuff and simply wanted to feed the llamas. On the side of the road someone has tied up about 5 or 6 llamas that you can feed with something that looked like rabbit pellets. After seeing my mate Claudio (a BA native on holiday in the North) take a self-portrait of himself and a llama I decided to do the same. Luckily they held of spitting on either of us, which I hear is a common enough problem.

So after a surprisingly painless flight from Salta to Iguazu I find myself with 24 hours to go and see falls that allegedly make Niagara look like a sprinkler and then get on another plane to BA. I’m not feeling a sleep in tomorrow.

Next time, Spring

Salta :: Argentina

Summer in the 'doze.

Places: Cordoba, Alta Gracia & Cabalango (via Carlos Paz).

Coolest thing I did: Saw the motorcycle they used in the movie version of The Motorcycle Diaries.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Child rearing practices seem to coddle the kids too much - in Argentina it seems normal to have your kid sleeping in a pram in a bar at 2am.

Much like my experience with the ‘doze, my time in Cordoba (hence forth known as the ‘dobe) is totally overshadowed by the fact it spent all the daylight hours I was there absorbing heat into it’s surface all day in order to make you imagine you’re walking around on the sun. Which is a pity, because Argentina’s second city does seem to have a vibrant cultural life, which is probably the result of having a long history of being a centre of learning (and more importantly drinking) for university students. The only problem of course with when I was there is there is said students had cleverly buggered off to the beach or mountains and left the streets to Europeans frying alive wondering why they are walking around the centre of a deserted city during the 5 or 6 hour siestas the locals have this time of year.

Now if you spend any length of time in the northern half of Argentina you’ll get to know fairly quickly that all the colonial centres are pretty much a central square with a town hall and a church of some kind on them (neatly dividing church and state by, usually, a statue of a man on a horse). The ‘dobe, being the first colonial capital of what would become Argentina (it’s complicated, don’t ask) lays down the blueprint for this, including the cathedral with Jesus in his pointing-to-his-own-chest pose, which I’ve taken to calling “I’m the Jesus” pose. In Thailand you see Buddha in about 4 or 5 common poses, which all have names, so I don’t see why Jesus can’t have his standard poses named too. He’s also well known for the peace sign pose, which I call “Japanese schoolgirl Jesus” and the one with his palm out, which I call “Gimme five Jesus”. You may get the feeling I’ve seen way too many colonial churches lately.

During the morning hours, and post-siesta every space in the pedestrianized streets is filled with people selling junk made in China off blankets. There seems to be a serious amount of hustling of pots and pans, baby clothes, socks, and even one bloke we saw selling hunting knives off a blanket. People keep telling me the hyper-inflation here is causing the middle class to pretty much have disappeared and I do wonder whether it’s causing a new breed of entrepreneurs who are somehow capable of sourcing 150 different baseball caps and a blanket are simply making up for the steeply rising cost of shop front rents.

The inflation, in fact, is pretty much the topic of conversation you end up with in the occasions you find yourself speaking to an Argie who speaks enough English to hold a conversation with someone with Spanish as woeful as mine. The restaurants draw their prices on the menus in pencil, no-one can leave the country for anywhere because their currency is worth less by the day, and despite the fact a good steak and beer costs well over 70 pesos people don’t keep enough change to let you pay for it with 100 pesos. Even McDonalds won’t change a hundred (or as Gerry has awesomely dubbed it, a hunjee).

Where were we? Oh yeah, Cordoba.

Despite the heat kind of getting everyone down during the day, the ‘dobe is a totally different town at night, even in summer. We only really managed one proper night out while we were there, but it didn’t take very long at all to find a strip of bars and nightclubs in town. After downing a 400g steak each (which is becoming a disturbingly normal size meal these days) we made our way along the canal that runs down the edge of downtown to Guemes, a barrio (suburb or neighbourhood to you gringos) named after some figure or other in Argie history. It’s not important who he was at this point, for some reason he made it possible for there to be heaps of bars that are also restaurants, and quite often nightclubs that span two or more streets. You have to get used to this eating at 11pm malarkey simply because you’ll be eating on your own if you don’t, and you’ll think the town has rubbish nightlife because no-one shows up before 2am.

If you’re a spirits drinker I strongly suggest that you try and make a mental switch to beer and/or wine before coming out to the A-Zone, they may have a book with pages of spirits as a menu, but quite often asking for 99% of the things on it will result in a series of ‘no lo tenemos’ (we don’t have it). They always have beer.

Inside the ‘dobe itself you’re supposed to go and look at heaps of old buildings left by people called Jesuits, who built churches, monasteries and universities. I know I’m usually good at this kind of thing, but to be honest it was way too hot to read up on any of it so I have no idea who the Jesuits were or why they were so important. From all the crosses on their rooves I suspect they were somehow related to the Catholic Church, but that’s just a wild guess.

What I mostly did is try to escape the city to see other stuff. The day trip out to Alta Gracia is supposed to include a look inside another important Jesuit but to be honest it was even hotter there than in the ‘dobe. Instead I saw the childhood home of Che Guevera, which was way cooler.

I’d forgotten the reams of captions I’d read in the temples to Che that pass for museums in Cuba and misplaced the fact that he was actually and Argentinian. The house in Alta Gracia is a nice change from all that because it’s mostly about how sickly a kid he was with asthma (which he never kicked), his time in medical school and his two epic journeys as a young man, first around Argentina and then more famously around Latin America, which he recorded in the Motorcycle Diaries, which I’ve read but never seen the movie that was made about a decade ago. They have the motorcycle they used for the film in the museum, which is kind of cool. They also dedicate a very small portion to the same photos you see in Cuba, but only the most famous ones of the post-revolutionary government and his adventures in Africa and, fatally Bolivia. They also have the obligatory blow up of the photo that launched a billion t-shirts. My favourite bit, however was the fact that the family bathroom has a sign on the toilet that says something like “don’t use this, it’s part of the museum”, which I guess means there’s been past incidents of tourists weeing in Che’s childhood dunny.

I liked the fact the hero worship, while still apparent in the one-sidedness of the political segments of the museum, is nothing like as prevalent is it is in the museums in Cuba. I still have my doubts that Che ever had x-ray vision or killed Godzilla with his bare hands. Communist dictatorships tend to have issues with balanced journalism.

One thing I didn’t notice in Cuba, but was blatantly obvious in Argentina was in lots of the pictures Che has a mate cup in hand. Mate (the ‘e’ should have an accent – not may-te, but mah-the) is what Argentinians do to while away bus trips, work days, routine traffic stops and pretty much anything else that allows you to have one hand free. It’s basically a kind of tea that you fill a special cup with, then you keep refilling that cup with hot water from a 1.5 litre thermos you carry with you everywhere and drinking the tea through a pipe that stops the tea leaves from getting in your mouth. Seeing Che do it probably fills the Argies with the same pride as I’d imagine Aussies would get seeing photos of Donald Bradman batting 322 with a stubbie in hand.

My other day trip was an exercise in being Argentinaed for pretty much an entire day. The owner of the hostel told us that in order to escape the heat the best thing to do would be to get a minibus out to a place out of town where the river is actually nice to swim in (the river through the ‘dobe has a kind of storm water drain quality to it) called Cabalango. So off we trudge, far too late in the day to the minibus station, just as the temperature is topping 40. When we arrive we find out the bus goes every hour and we just missed one by like 10 mins. So we buy tickets and wait for the bus, which is about 20 mins late and has a broken door. There’s a fair bit of faffing around with the door for another 20 mins or so, until we’re allowed on. This catch is there were 4 of us and by the time 3 of us have gotten on they say they’ve sold too many tickets and the bus is full. So we get off and get told to take another bus which comes in another 20 mins to a town called Carlos Paz which is on the way and get onto another bus there. Needless to say, by the time we actually got to the mythical land of Cabalango we had about 45 mins before we had to get back on the bus and go back, because I was in danger of missing my 9pm bus to Salta.

Having said all that, it was a very nice spot and with the day’s stupid heat it was very nice to actually sit in the rockpools above the river for about half an hour. We were also lucky we got told to go the last stop on the bus and swim there, because half of Cordoba seems to be in the river all want to go home at the same time. I’d have been totally Argentinaed if we’d been one of those in the massive queues the bus driver ignored on his way back to town.

Much like the ‘doze, I think I have to reserve judgement on the ‘dobe due to the massive caveat that the heat has pretty much scarred my view of the places. From what I saw they’d both be very nice cities to spend a few days in during spring or autumn, or even later summer but in the heat they aren’t that pleasant. Funnily enough I spent a lot of time explaining myself to people that just because I’m from Sydney it doesn’t make me some kind of mutant crab man who is impervious to heat. The only reason we actually have less of an issue with 40 degrees in Sydney is because we also have heaps of beaches, swimming pools and (out West) air conditioned shopping centres to hide out in. Stand on the platform of Wynyard station at 5pm in the middle of summer in a suit and see if Sydney is any better than these places in the heat.

So Gerry and I parted ways for a little while as he wanted to spend some time on the beach before he has to fly back on the weekend and I was keen to still see Salta and surrounds while I was already in the North of Argentina. It was with strange relief that I got off the bus to find it 25 degrees and raining.