9: "To the north, to the desert: Part 2"

I got into Salta after dark.

I got to my hostel, ate some fruit, wrote, talked with a receptionist and a Porteña who was there on vacation. We were talking about Swine Flu.

I showed them the photo I’d taken of Cristina Kirchner. The Buenos Aires girl liked it, fawned. The receptionist started swearing and pretended to stab my camera. He said the U.S. has got it figured out, that the three branches of government are separate, clean, apart from each other. He said here it’s all mixed together.

I went upstairs to the bar where they were playing The Rolling Stones, Daft Punk, The Clash…standard hostel fare. A blonde Scandinavian girl was working the bar.

The receptionist came upstairs with a couple of his friends, who were going horesback riding to the mountains tomorrow. They’d ride up there, cook an asado, take naps, practice lassoing, ride back down by sunset.

I showed them the photo of Kirchner. They shouted and flicked their lighters at my camera.

I drank a Quilmes, wrote a bit, while English and Australian and French kids talked and played foosball. When I went down to my room to sleep, a Chinese kid had fallen asleep in my bed. I grabbed a couple blankets and made up the one free mattress and went to sleep.

The next day I walked to the center of town. There’s a famous archeological museum in Salta that has some child mummies found in the Andes. They were a sacrifice, apparently. The museum was closed because of the Flu.

I hiked to the edge of town and up a mountain, along a stone stair trail, past monuments for the Stations of the Cross. At the top was a park, with a restaurant, waterfalls, a trim and green lawn, benches, shops, and a big building to haul in the gondolas and the riders that rise up from near the bus station at ground level.

I went to a quiet part of the peak, sitting in the shade under a tree. I ate an apple and some biscuits I’d got from the bus. A gardener came over and told me to move, that I could only sit on the benches.

I got up and moved. I saw him go to somebody sitting at the base of a statue, telling her to get down and move to a bench.

I hiked down in the afternoon, passed through the central plaza again, then got on a bus for Jujuy.

Jujuy has a quarter million people and is in a valley of the Andes. It´s the last big city before Bolivia and Chile. It’s an Argentine city, but the people begin to look different this far north – with roots more Andean than European.

I wandered around the city after dark, looking for a place to stay. The first hostel was full. The second was out of business, just a dim outline of where signs used to be on the walls and doors. I stayed at a place near the bus station – decent, tiny rooms, no windows though.

Near the bus station is a big market. There’s vendors set-up in cramped stalls selling…clothes, choripan, quack medicine, hot dogs, cookware, kebabs, plastic toys, unlabeled spices…a lot of it looks imported from China. A clothes store near the market had a window display with three mannequins. One was wearing a respiratory Flu mask. One had an American flag bandana tied covering his face. One was wearing a gas mask.

There are restaurants here too, little dives with tile floors, scattered metal tables, florescent lighting, plastic curtain doorways and cheap, good, greasy food. Spicy, too – the first I’ve seen in the country.

The next day I went to a café – the archeological museum here was shut, too. I passed through an artisan market, an art space with a Jujuy painting competition on display, and over the little, dry Rio Grande and the shantytowns on its banks.

I got on a bus for Humahuaca, the oldest settlement in the Quebrada de Humahuaca – the valley of the Rio Grande that’s got polychrome desert mountains and ancient ruins and sentinel cacti.

Humahuaca’s a tiny town – 9000 people or so. I got in at 8pm. It was dark and chill and moist. I hiked out of town to my hostel. I took a wrong turn and started walking on a trail up and out to the desert. The stars were bright and shining and sharp. I could see the Milky Way just like on the beach in Brazil.

I backtracked, found the right way, got chased by a dog that squeezed under its fence and ran out into the road, and got to the hostel. I checked in, put my bags down in an adobe cottage with a cane-thatched roof, and went into the lobby to sit and read Typee and warm-up by a space heater screwed on top of a tank of butane gas. The guy working the desk said I couldn’t shower in the morning, that it gets so cold at night the water can freeze and it’s too hard to heat it until the strong sun during midday.

The next day, Sunday, I got up for breakfast, which was the standard toast and jam and dulce de leche and tea, though all nicely, carefully, quietly served in ceramic jars and plates and mugs and dishes.

I headed to town, through the market. I heard people speaking Quechua, saw old ladies wearing flat, long-brimmed black hats and men wearing knit ponchos. The people were soft-spoken, with less gesture, strut, than most Argentines. I bought bananas and oranges, then bread and cheese and bottles of water, and headed for Coctaca, a village 10Km out in the desert, along a gravel road, where there’s pre-Columbian ruins.

I was walking alone most of the time. Every now and then a car or motorcycles would pass, coming or going. I could stop and look around and see nothing but hills and mountains and cacti and brush. No shade. No clouds, nor trees. No other people. A few birds and bugs flying around. I could hear my heart beating.

One moment I could hear water running. There was a shallow creek that ran away from the town and crossed the road a few kilometers out. It flows down the valley to meet the Rio Grande, which runs south to Jujuy to meet the Rio Xibi Xibi. When I got up there, there was ice and snow in the water. It was midday, clear, bright sun.

I picked up some snow. The crystals were long and sharp, white, shining needles that looked like they would cut you. I held it in my hand, felt the cold wet burn, then threw it at a cactus. All the snow in the creek had melted when I came back in the afternoon, on my way home before dusk.

Approaching Coctaci, I passed tiny ranches, one with a few cows in the pasture, each place a couple low brick buildings, some with clothes hanging on the line, one with smoke coming out the chimney. They had thin thatched roofs held down with big stones along the edge.

I got to Coctaci. There was a soccer field, dusty and covered with rocks. Around the main square were just a few houses, a little chapel. There were a couple kids out but they didn’t come talk to me.

I got to the ruins, looked around, sat in a line of shade from a cactus, and ate my lunch. It got chilly in the shade.

I climbed higher up the terraces and lied down and took a nap in the sun.

I woke up, brushed the grass off my clothes, headed back as the day got late. A couple people were washing a mini-van in the creek that runs through town. They had pulled it up over a bed of rocks and were wiping it with rags.

I listened to M83 on the way in. At night I ate at a little restaurant in town, like one of those florescent, quick, cheap dives in Jujuy. I got a plate of rice and chicken and potatoes, bread, and spicy sauce for less than three dollars.

The next day I wandered through town, past the dozens of stands and vendors and tables all set-up to the parade of tourists, of foreigners and Argentines who feel like foreigners, who come to buy a trinket or bibelot, a striped bright table cloth, a llama figurine, a poncho, a sweater. It was the same stuff at each stall, and the same stuff in Jujuy, and in Salta. Guides were leading travelers past the church, past town hall. People were walking with their camcorders in front of them, turning this way and that, recording as they went through the narrow brick-paved streets.

A couple guys were selling these metallic oblong magnetic things. When you throw them in the air and they touch, they buzz and rattle. I saw the same things, heard the same noise, at Sun Yat-Sen´s tomb in Nanjing.

I got some coca leaves at a grocery store and walked to an overlook above the town while they soaked in my cheek.

I got on an afternoon bus back to Jujuy, to cross the puna – the high Andean plains – the next day and then cross the border to Chile. I stayed at the same hotel. New room across the hall. Still no window.