If, on a winter's night a traveler outside the town of Malbork, leaning from a steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down into the gathering shadow...on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave, what story there awaits its end? -italo calvino
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Bolivia continued: Potosí and Sucre
10 Things I learned in Bolivia:
1. Do not assume that the little line on the map marking your travel route is a paved road.
2. Do not fuck around with altitude. For real.
3. Llama meat is tasty.
4. Coca is not a drug. It is actually quite helpful.
5. It will be cold in Bolivia, even in the summer.
6. High altitude sun burns.
7. Always have coins in your pocket; bathrooms are NOT free.
8. My 8’s multiplication tables.
9. Substistence farming at 4000 meters is not an easy life.
10. You can ride in a taxi in La Paz and NOT be kidnapped, tortured, and/or die.
If I could steal a highway sign with my beloved llama crossing without fear of the Bolivian police deporting me before my journey was over, I would. We spent a lot of time on Bolivia’s roads, and when I say “roads” this is definitely a broad and liberal definition. It took us only a day in Bolivia to see a llama, but mysteriously a week and a half to see a paved road. I guess I’ll take llamas over paved roads, but best of all is the luxury of having both at once.
We departed Uyuni the day after our tour was over, this time by bus. By “bus” I mean a motorized vehicle that seats more than 10 with wheels and an engine. Gone were the safe baggage compartments of our Argentine busses: all bags are tossed on top and lashed down with a flimsy plastic tarp. Also gone were the shocks of our vehicle. Years of traversing over-used dirt roads turned the suspension of the vehicle into rigid popsicle sticks bouncing on bald tires. Mmm, sounds like a comfortable ride, no? I suppose I was predisposed to dislike the journey from Uyuni to Potosí from the beginning, as I thought it was going to take three hours. Little did I know that expectation (not even the reality) was six. Somewhere around hour 2, sitting in a broken seat whose reclining mechanism wouldn’t lock, I noticed that I had ceased to slide back and forth like a NordicTrack machine; my seat was straight upright and the scenery was still. Hmm. As I looked about me, I saw no rest stop, no small town that might have been some other passenger’s destination, and no signs of human life. We were in the middle of the desert, and we were not on the road. The bus, in all its rugged glory, was mired in a pit of sand.
At first I thought this must be just a small delay; surely the driver would not have taken such a large risk as to strand us in the desert. Oh no, I was wrong. The primary road, the texture of a gigantic washboard, was about 30 yards away. Our bus was somewhere in the sand, apparently following a secondary or tertiary route. It became clear after about 10 minutes of sitting in the heat that the bus wasn’t going anywhere without a whole lot of help. Subsequently all of the male passengers from 15 to 65 disembarked from the vehicle and began to help, directed by the driver and the bus company assistant. NB: It also became clear that this happens with some degree of frequency, or the bus companies wouln’t need a assistant to unload goods, do impromptu repairs, and manage all the other non-driving aspects of the trip. D got off the bus as well to help, and joined about 11 other people gathering stones, pulling up brush, and doing whatever they could think of to get some traction for the tires.
One hour later, yes, that’s sixty minutes of spinning wheels in sand, our bus limped its way back to the main road, and we bumped along for another four hours to Potosí. I was not in a fantastic mood when we arrived, not helped by the fact that the hostel where we planned to stay did not have any private rooms, so we were stuck in a 12 bed dormitory. I was on the bottom bunk, which had a large metal bar in the center, located exactly where my head always seemed to want to go.
POTOSÍ
Pros: ATMs, hot chocolate a la española, interesting architecture, wool products
Cons: Altitude, poverty, oppressive scenery, coldness, mine, Spanish dominion/rape of culture
We were sick in Potosí, so perhaps it got a little short changed. We spent most of our time lying in bed, sipping ginger ale and eating crackers very, very slowly. That said, it was an interesting introduction to Bolivian culture. I learned a good deal about the history of the Spanish conquest, but with each new lecture, reading, or conversation it got more depressing.
The Spaniards stripped Potosí of its mineral wealth through the mine at Cerro Rico, which looms in the background of almost every narrow cobbled street of the city. From here, over 45,000 tons on silver poured out of South America into Europe during two centuries. The immensity of this wealth is hard to imagine, even by modern standards; it is almost impossible to comprehend it in Renaissance terms. That silver financed the famous Armada, built palaces in Toledo, Madrid, and Seville, and let the Spanish Empire spend itself into oblivion, thinking that the riches of the Americas were limitless.
One of the most interesting things that we did in Potosí was visit the Casa de la Moneda, the Mint. In the beginning of the Spanish occupation, all of Bolivia belonged to the territory of Alto Peru, whose capital was Cusco. Potosí served as the financial center of the province, providing currency for most of South America. We toured the huge two-block square complex to see the smelting rooms (some of which were still crusted with carbon) the laminating rooms where pure silver ingots were rolled flat into sheets, and the coining rooms. As the only anglos on a tour of about 25 people, we were selected to participate in a demonstration of one of the Spanish lock boxes used to transport the finished coins to other regions, or back to Spain. Bronze ornaments on the front slid side to side or up and down in various patterns to reveal hidden keyholes meant to dissuade pirates or highway robbers. If you didn’t know how to move the metal knobs, it was impossible to access the 3rd and secret keyhole. It was quite fun handling the old leather and steel case, and I felt at little like I was in an Indiana Jones movie, only with less insects and life-threatening situations. Yet for all the richness in Cerro Rico, it is hard to feel luxury or decadence in Potosí. The altitude, combined with horrible working conditions in the mines and mint killed millions of workers, and continues to do so today. In the 1700’s, mercury was commonly used to refine silver, so the indigenous people working the smelting rooms didn’t live too long. The Spanish used animals for the laminating presses, after African slaves and indigenous ones died too quickly; mules came up to Potosí by the thousands. While the Casa de Moneda churned out coins, it also went through animals: a mule’s lifespan once it reached the mint’s winding presses was anywhere from two days to two months, rarely more. Like most of the historical places in Potosí, it was fascinating...until you realized the suffering and abuse that took place to create it. Death on a large scale is never far from one’s mind in Potosí, making it a less than ideal tourist destination.
Cerro Rico is still an operational mine, available for tours seven days a week. The miners have no health insurance, still work closely with toxic chemicals like mercury and arsenic, and there are few modern safety features in the tunnels. A miner today may be lucky if he lives to be 40. We opted not to take the tour, finding it somewhat strange that European and American travellers descend for an hour to smile, take pictures, and marvel at the dynamite while hundreds of Bolivians toil away at less than minimum wage. Instead, I read an extraordinary photo book about miners’ wives and widows. Sounds like a pretty rough life, and they don’t need specators.
We left Potosí slightly healed but a little down in spirits. Not even the authentic Spanish-style chocolate at the local yuppie coffee shop could cheer me up at 4060 meters above sea level. It was time to come back down to earth.
SUCRE
A cab took us down the peaks and through the fertile altiplano down to Sucre; every kilometer of the 2 hour ride, I thanked the Bolivian government for providing us with a paved road, our first since entering the country. While slightly lower than the towering Potosí, Sucre, the judicial capital of Bolivia, is still up in the mountains.
Our first hotel was smack in the center of town, a block from the Plaza de Armas, the center of every Bolivian town. We were just getting over our Potosí digestive illness, so spirits were on the mend, but we were eating conservatively.
Sucre was wonderful. There were restaurants that served vegetables other than potatoes, real museums, and lots of history to be learned. South America’s revolutions began in Bolivia; it was the first country to declare independence from Spain, but ironically the last to actually win it. It was in Sucre, specifically in the Casa de la Libertad, an old Jesuit cathedral, that the famed liberator Simón Bolívar announced his plans for a united South America, and here that the other fracticious diplomats and generals voted it down (the congress decided to name the country after him as a sort of conciliatory gesture). We learned about famous Bolivian war heroes, and the concatenation of tragedies that form Bolivia’s political history: their alliance with Peru during the Guerra del Pacífico (War of the Pacific 1879-1883) followed by Peru’s betrayal and Bolivia’s loss of the coast, as well as other military mishaps and land concessions that left Bolivia without access to the sea, and bereft of several mineral-rich territories in the lowlands. Sucre also got screwed in a similar fashion when La Paz usurped its role as the country’s capital. Only the judicial branch of government and the Supreme Court remain in the “White City” of whitewashed and granite walls; all the rest of the administration, including the President, the charismatic champion of indigenous rights, Evo Morales.
Another big hit was the Museo de Arte Indígena (ASur) , a textile museum. We had been seeing tons of wall hangings, tapestries, and other assorted textiles since we left Salta, but knew little about the process involved, the regional differences, or how to tell a quality piece of work from shoddy craftsmanship. The process was fascinating, especially given my interest in wool products. Weaving in many Bolivian rural communities was a dying art practiced only by old women, until in the 1990’s an anthropological study increased awareness and cultural pride. Some white guy decided that it would be a great idea if he could get all the old ladies together, share their knowledge, and teach the next generation.
Surprisingly, it worked. Many native Bolivians jumped on the bandwagon, and the result is a self-sustaining museum and store run by middle or upper class educated Bolivians who distribute the income from textile sales back to the rural communities where the weavers live. Not only did the project save ancient traditions from extinction, but it also inspired men to take up weaving as well, a practice which ended nearly a century ago. Traditionally, women wove on looms with warp and woof, while the process of tapestry making (using a needle to loop thread around a vertical structure of threads) was men’s domain. In the late 1990’s, two men in Tarabuco decided to learn the art of tapestry making; now, there are several dozen male weavers, some of whom exhibit their work in the ASur. The entire system is a real-life example of sustainable tourism; the organization gives about 60% of each weaving’s cost to the weaver, then uses the other percentage for museum maintenance and other administrative costs. It is a place that respects rural life while acknowledging the difficulties of subsistence living in a globalized society. Women with large families living in poverty are able to recieve adequate compensation for their hard work and artistry; with prices ranging from USD 50 to 250, it means that weavers can sustain themselves with a living wage, instead of hawking their wares at random street markets for whatever they can bargain. Collectively, their bargaining power is stronger, and the museum, having contracted with the most talented weavers in the surrounding areas of Tarabuco and Jalq’a assures that the buyer recieves a high quality product that merits the extra expense.
Speaking of the quality of weavings, I was astounded at the intricacy and craftsmanship of the works. There were two styles of textiles on exhibit, both from different municipalities close to Sucre. As we began traveling, I realized that the textiles vary quite a bit as you move north through the Andes. Instead of there being a typical “Andean” weaving, each community has its own style. Once upon a time during the Inka Empire, this was very important for maintaining cultural distinctions within the structure of the Empire. The language may have been homogenized and their may have been a strong political allegiance to the Inca (the title means “all powerful” in Quechua), but communities were allowed to maintain traditions which distinguished them from other cultures. This cultural pride is what Bolivia holds on to fiercely in the highlands, in the face of an increasingly Westernized global society.
The Tarabuco weavings follow a relatively linear narrative; the fabric is divided into vertical sections (between 3 and 9), with zigzags filling two of the sections to signify the “path of life” as one weaver said. Being from flat land, this made little sense to me...then I climbed a mountain. To my surprise, from the opposite face of the mountain, our path really did zig up switchbacks exactly as it appeared on the textiles. The other sections tell a story: the harvest, how to weave cloth, a wedding, etc. The subject matter is daily life, the kay pacha in Quechua, or the earthly world where we life. Each story seems printed on the pages of a book: the cotton background is papery white, the images stand out as letters on a page. The figures are either bright oranges, reds, and greens, or more subdued colors: purples, blues, and blacks (when the weaver goes through a period of mourning for someone). . The one I eventually purchased is in mourning colors: a fable about a fox stealingn bread and some very duck-like birds which I was assured are “condors.” The jury is still out.
The textiles from Jalq’a visualize the uku pacha, or underworld, a place of dreams and death, the unknown. Hanan Pacha, the heavenly world of the gods and condors, I suppose is too holy to represent in textile form. Jal’qa weavings are all bi-color with a deep red or orange and black or blue. The designs are a crazy mix of animal and human forms, distorted as if in a dream or nightmare. Condors morph into llamas, who have curled up humans inside their bellies, six legs, or scary fangs. It’s a little disorienting to try and find patterns and images within the cloth, but they are there if you stare long enough. Beautiful, but a bit freaky for day to day use.
We liked Sucre.
Spending the winter holidays away from family was a little strange; instead of having presents, we watched a line form for five blocks as little Bolivian girls waited for hours, hoping that the truck full of blonde, skinny Barbies still had a free gift for them. Christmas dinner was a bust at a crappy restaurant on the plaza, but other food finds made up for the anticlimactic holiday fare, specifically bubbling vegetarian lasagna NOT microwaved, but homemade in its own terra cotta dish.
Our Christmas present to each other was splurging for one night in a really nice hotel. The Parador Santa Maria used to a be a wealthy landowner’s mansion, but someone had the idea to convert it into lodging, like the Spanish government’s parador system. Totally refurbished and equipped for modern life, the building was beautiful. We only walked in to take refuge from a thunderstorm, and since half the rooms were empty and the owner was bored, he gave us the grand tour, including the glass-enclosed terrace mirador and the old catacombs in the basement. In colonial times, the entire city of Sucre was connected through a network of underground tunnels. Then, since he was clearly in a generous mood, the owner proceeded to give us a deep discount on a small room on the third floor, so we decided what the heck, we deserve a bit of luxury. Feather pillows and hot showers awaited us on December 26th, just a bit late for the holiday.
Eventually, it was time to leave Sucre and head to our final Bolivian destination, Lake Titicaca, another story for another day.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Salar de Uyuni
We arrived in Uyuni via a train mistakenly called “Expreso del Sur,” which crawled over, around, and up the beginnings of the Andes from the Argentine-Bolivan border to the former railroad nexus of Uyuni, now a dried out tourist town that functions primarily as a jumping off point for tours to the Salar of Uyuni and points beyond.
Our transition from Argentina to Boliva was quite horrible, yet uneventful. The bus dropped us off in the border town of La Quiaca at 5:30 am, where a helpful sign under a buzzing streetlight told us that we were 5000 kilometers from Ushuaia, the southernmost city in Argentina. We thought the border opened at 7:00, but it was unclear whether this was Bolivian time or Argentine time, as they are an hour apart in the summer. Luckily, it’s nice and toasty in summer, right? This is true most of the time, but unfortunately when you’re at 3460 meters above sea level, it’s freaking cold at night. So there we were, shivering on the border in the dark with a handful of backpackers and several families carrying even more stuff than we had in our backpacks. I had hope at sunrise, when the cold abated slightly, but we still had another hour of waiting before we figured out that the officials were operating on Bolivian time. Finally we got our exit and entry stamps, filled out the requisite paperwork and entered Villazón, the gateway to Boliva!
I can say with some margin of error that I never in my life wish to return to Villazón. The ten hours that we spent in that god-forsaken town were the longest I’ve experienced in quite some time. They are perhaps rivalled by the 12 hours of FCAT and pre-FCAT testing, proctoring angry adolescents in my first year of teaching. The frigid sky of the previous sleepless night filled with cancer rays of death by 9:00 am, threatening to turn my nordic skin into a lobster carapace. There were no restaurants. There were no grocery stores. The only sustenance we had was granola and water. I cannot even begin to describe my ecstasy when we walked into the train station at 7:45 am to find that the only train that day left at 3:30 pm. After we drank the water that we had, there were no public bathrooms. The restrooms in the train station closed down at 10:00 am, and there were no ATMs to get bolivian money so that we could pay for other bathrooms in undisclosed or sketchy locations. The one saving grace was that we arrived on a Saturday, when there was a train leaving, instead of Sunday. I shudder to think what would have happened if our schedule had been just one day off.
Luckily, the trip to Uyuni was well worth the agony at the border. The train itself was quite pleasant; we opened up our panoramic window in first class and watched the red mountains of northern Argentina bake into the bronze peaks of the Bolivian Andes. Every once in a while a fertile valley complete with weeping willows and flocks of grazing sheep would peek out from behind the hillsides, and the train would clickety clack on. We saw arid plains with desert grasses, farm towns, dried riverbeds, steeply carved sandstone valleys, and the beginning of the altiplano: Bolivia’s high altitude plains. They even served us a meal in the dining car as part of our swank ticket, making up for the lack of food in Villazón. Potatoes, specifically fried, featured significantly in the meal. I have become quite used to seeing french fries at every meal here in Bolivia, with the exception of a few culinary treasures in Potosí, Sucre, and Copacabana. At the time, I cared not that the American tuber was my primary source of calories.
After a leisurely trip, we stepped off into the cold night air of Uyuni at midnight. Immediately, as in Cafayate, a tour agent accosted us. This time, she was advertising not only a tour company, but a hostel as well. I laughed when I told her we already had reservations at her hotel, but was glad for the company on the deserted streets. We slept well that night, after nearly 28 hours of sleepless traveling. When we awoke, we discovered that Uyuni in the morning isn’t a whole lot different than Uyuni at midnight. I think that the only time that the town is really busy is during the weekend street market. In this sense the town is much same as Villazón...unfortunately, we didn’t need a haunch of raw llama meat that Saturday morning.
We did need a tour company, money, and breakfast. As there were no ATM’s in Uyuni either, #2 nearly became an issue, but of course #1 had all their prices in US dollars, and we didn’t really have time for #3 because we found out the night before that all tours leave at 10:30 am, regardless of the company.
At this moment, I would like to elaborate on the process of choosing #1. In the past five years or so Uyuni has become a tourist mecca, drawing adventurers from all over the world in search of impressive scenery. To meet this demand, dozens of private tour companies have sprung up. Essentially anyone with a Toyota 4x4 (cuatro por cuatro...as we heard many a time in the next few days) put a sign up and called themselves a tour agency. The guidebooks essentially say that it’s blind luck if you get a great company or a lemon of a truck that breaks down in the middle of a desert or on the mountainside, if your food makes you sick or gets you going in the morning, or if the people in your group are psychopaths or your next best friends. We were also warned that sometimes in order to complete the magic group of 6 that fits in the two back seats of the SUV, you may sign up with one tour company, pay them, and then end up in some other company’s car. This very same thing happened to us, although we were completely ignorant of the fact until we arrived back at the tour company’s “office” 4 days later, but the office had a different name and was on a different street.
The fact that we didn’t actually go with the tour company in the book with the cute name and professional brochure was irrelevant, for we were utterly and miraculously lucky on all parts of our trip. The other four passengers were pleasant, sociable, and not at all obnoxious: a Dutch student and three French Canadians from Montreal volunteering for OxFam in Boliva. The car didn’t break down at all, save one flat tire on the very last day only a few kilometers from the city. The food was nourishing if uninspired; there were vegetables at every meal, and we had llama steaks the first afternoon for lunch, quite the novelty. Our guide Eddie was cheerful without being grating, and knew the spiderwebs of dirt roads like a National Geographic map. He found us wildlife, made sure we got to the sights ahead of other tour groups, and drove like a sane person around mountain curves. He and the cook, Elba, warmed up to us gringos as the trip went on, making for quite a pleasant social dynamic among the 8 of us. Luckily, all of us spoke Spanish, so most of the trip was spent conversing in that language, with smatterings of English, French, even Dutch and German thrown in.
Once we loaded up the 4x4, threw our backpacks on top to be wrapped in a tarp and squeezed ourselves into the two back seats of the truck. I had an open mind, expecting to learn a great deal about a part of the world very foreign to my home. All my life I have lived by the ocean. I’m quite attached to it, and get lonely if I can’t see waves for a few weeks. In Bolivia, I didn’t expect to find anything that resembled the ocean, and knew in some part of my mind that being nearly 4000 meters above my beloved Atlantic would be quite different.
But before we could see the sights, as with all good tours, we had to stop and be accosted by merchants trying to sell you things that you don’t really need. Honestly, does anyone require a figurine of a llama carved out of a salt block? Uyuni is not known for its textiles, the blankets, camera bags, and hats for sale were probably produced on a machine. Instead of participating in the market, I chose instead to make friends with a domesticated vicuña, one of the local camelids, who was happily munching on carrot pieces outside. This was my first ever vicuña sighting, so I was fairly excited to see the rare mammal and be able to pet its valuable fur. Vicuñas are shy animals who the Quechua and Aymara people indigenous to Peru and Bolivia domesticated into the docile alpaca. This one, our guide told us, had most likely been raised in captivity and hand-fed. My new friend was clearly more interested in her carrots than she was in me, so she wandered off in search of more tasty nibbles after a few minutes of me following her around with my camera.
Por fin, as they say here, we entered the Salar. The dusty roads turned whiter and more compact as we left town, crystallizing into one of the largest salt flats in the world. According to geological history, most of Bolivia and northern Argentina were once covered by an inland sea called Lake Minchin. When the Andes popped up some time after the dinosaurs died out during the Cenozoic Era, parts of the sea rushed out to join the Atlantic forming valleys like the Quebrada de Cafayate ], and the rest of it just dried up. Thus was formed the more than 10,000 square km Salar of Uyuni, the world’s largest. Try and put that in your salt shaker.
The air was dry and clear, with clouds billowing far away on the horizon near the mountains that circle the Salar. Perspective becomes quickly distorted out in the salar, because the horizon is uniformly flat for miles; the Andes in the distance never seemed to move during the first few hours that we spent in the car, but somehow we were moving forward. Then in front of us dark blobs materialized out of the shimmering sky which floated on top of the salt flats. As we moved closer, I realized that they were “islands” in the ancient sea, rock formations isolated in the middle of the Salar. One of the largest ones was our next destination, Isla del Pescado (Fish Island), so named because from afar it resembles a fish swimming on top of the salt.
But before we reached the island we had another stop: the Hoted de Sal (Salt Hotel). The novelty of these accomodations, miles away from running water, roads, or civilization, is that the entire building and its furnishings are built of salt. The walls are salt blocks, the floors are crushed salt granules, and the tables are massive slabs of salt. Even the chairs are carved salt. The only non-salt parts of the building were the straw roof and the wooden doors for each room. We spent the first night in another, less-famous, hotel made of salt on the outskirts of the Salar, for a much reduced fee. The bathrooms cost twice as much as in Uyuni, and bottle of cold Coke carried a 200% markup in the Salar’s Salt Hotel. After a brief tour of the building, it was back to the car.
As the sun reached its zenith, we took our midday break. Isla del Pescado turned from a fish into a large rock formation, a small mountain covered in over 6,000 cardón cacti. I wouldn’t have thought that anything could live in the middle of so much salt, but the island itself was teeming with life. The cacti were in bloom, their creamy yellow blossoms feeding insects and small birds, rodents scrambled about under rocks, and lizards skittered under rocks as we walked up the main path to pay our park entrance fee. A short hike up to the summit provided incredible views of salt as far as the eye could see. Everyone was panting on the relatively easy walk, and at the time I didn’t realize why I felt so tired. That evening as I lay curled in my bed with a nasty bout of altitude sickness, I came to fully appreciate the workout your body recieves just fulfilling ordinary tasks at 3.6000 meters above sea level. When we descended to the parking area, lunch was already set up and waiting: pan-seared llama steaks with rice and vegetables, with the ubiquitous Coca Cola as refreshment. The llama was surprisingly delicious, tasting slightly like a porkchop, but different.
After lunch, we followed a pair of grey week tracks across the Salar to its western border. There, to my surprise, was a small village sustained by agriculture and the occasional tour group. Whoever decided to farm right next to a salt flat must have loved a challenge; the tiny quinua plants were struggling to find water and nutrients in the harsh earth. Not twenty yards away from the fields the whiteness of the Salar stretched menacingly over the horizon, defying anyting to survive in its bounds. I watched in amazement as the road passed by field after field, finally ending at our own small Salt Hotel.
Amazed by the strange landscape, several of our group decided to make an expedition up the nearest hill before the sun set, to see if we could find any interesting views. I grabbed my camera while other more seasoned hikers packed water and flashlights, and then we were off. When we left the rustic hotel, I noticed that there were large rounded rock formations all along the path, much the same as on Isla del Pescado. I stopped to investigate one more closely, and realized from its texture and pattern that it was fossilized coral. The “islands” in the salar are the petrified remains of a coral reef, physical evidence of the sea that left Bolivia millions of years ago. When my eyes returned to the landscape, I started to imagine things from a completely different perspective. The towering cylindrical cacti were now kelp, the dried tumbleweed turned to sea-fans, and the tan dirt became the undulating sand of the sea-floor. The desert on the hillside was analagous to the ocean that it had once been, just drier. The land has retained most of the physical features of a reef and ocean bottom, but you don’t need scuba gear to wander through this mysterious terrain, only a pair of hiking boots. We made it halfway up the nearest peak before we realized that it was more than an afternoon hike. As the sun sank behind the other side of the mountain, we began our way back down, hoping we would make it back to the hotel before dark. It was a good deal easier going down than up, so we had plenty of tiime to spare. We also spotted a vizcacha, an Andean chinchilla, and her baby, a treat at the end of our hike. The odd appearance of the animal added to the surreal nature of the scenery: vizcachas are a strange mix of squirrel and rabbit with long ears, strong legs, and a long fluffy tail. Their grey coloring blends perfectly with the rocks, where they hop along looking for food in the evening. Unfortunately, I overexerted myself, not being accustomed to the effects of altitude on my body, so I headed immediately to bed with a splitting headache.
The next day we headed out early to see our first volcano. Ollague is one of three volcanoes in the Salar area which is sharded with Chile. One face of the volcano is considered Bolivian property, the other Chilean. Both countries work the surrounding land, mining various chemicals which provide considerable income. After a brief look at Ollague’s smoking peak, we headed south to our destination of the day: Reserva Natural de Flora y Fauna Eduardo Avaroa. Even for native Spanish speakers, it’s a mouthful. Little did I know when we set out, but the “Salar” tour isn’t really a tour of the Salar. Only the first day of a four day trip is spent in the Salar de Uyuni; the rest is a circuit of southwestern Bolivia, touching the Chilean border before heading back north to Uyuni.
The Eduardo Avaroa Nature Reserve is a large semi-desert area filled with rock formations, and more famously, dozens of lagoons. These lagoons vary in color from deep blue to briliant red, depending on their mineral deposits. At the entrance of the park is Laguna Colorada (Red Lagoon), so named for its coppery depths, due to a hgh concentration of iron. Seventy thousand mating pairs of flamingos make their home there during the rainy season, so when we arrived in the morning the shores of the lake were peppered with birds filtering out their breakfast. From the view point on a cliff above the lake, the red color was even more pronounced, highlighting the light pink flamingos. I would have expected that many birds to make more noise, but they didn’t seem to mind a few humans wandering around. We watched from afar, and then piled back into the car for an entire day of flamingos and lagoon-hopping. At the next lagoon, colored by sulfur and boric acid instead of Laguna Colorada’s red iron, were able to see the birds from closer up; I stalked through the tall paja reeds along the spongy shore in search of the closest photo I could take without scaring the flock. We lunched near another strong smelling sulfuric lagoon, amidst grazing vicuñas and more flamingoes.
The vicuña, which seemed almost abundant in the Reserve, was hunted to near extinction by the early 20th century, and is just beginning to come back. About the size of a pony, with pointy ears and huge goofy eyes, the vicuña has a coat as soft and as valuable as cashmere. One animal produces about 8 grams of wool every two years. Because it is a wild animal, it can’t be shorn in the same way that alpacas or llamas can; it needs to keep a layer of hair to protect itself from the extremes of temperatures on the altiplano. Opportunistic fur traders used to kill vicuñas to take their hides, but this is now prohibited. Bolivia, Chile, and Peru, which share the Atacama Desert that this diminuative camelid calls home, have made great conservation efforts to protect and breed vicuñas. the Eduardo Avaroa Reserve now has several hundred vicuñas that wander the grounds, eating desert shrubs and surviving on what little fresh water they can find.
When the sun set on our second day in the park, I wished I had a vicuña coat of my own: the temperature fell dramatically after a vibrant desert sunset. During the day, the weather was pleasant: in the 80’s under the blazing sun, considerably cooler in the shade. At night, however, it fell to the 40’s and the wind whipped away whatever warmth I might have saved from the midday sun. I was shocked at how cold it was on the altiplano, considering that it was nearly midsummer. My fragile little body, accustomed to balmier climes, would be destroyed in a Bolivian winter.
It was still quite cold when we left our tiny cabin in the Reserve on the third day of the tour. We had to start driving at 5:00 am in order to reach the natural geysers at sunup; the cold morning air makes the steamy jets more dramatic. Our group arrived right on schedule, the second of dozens of trucks passing by the second to last stop on the regular Uyuni route. The air around the geyser field was warm and toasty, quite the relief to the earlier chill. Unfortunately, it reeked of sulfur and the other chemicals found in abundance near the Salar. The geysers sprang up out of pits of boiling mud several feet deep; there must have been at least twenty of them spread out over an acre of sand, giving the landscape a lunar feel in the grey and red light of dawn. People wandered in and out of the steam, disappearing for a moment and then materializing several feet from where they had been. All of this, on just a few hours’ sleep, was quite the sight. But we didn’t stay long at the geysers—breakfast waited for us at the hotsprings!
A ten minute drive from the geysers was another lagoon, still full of flamingoes and chemicals, but naturally heated to 95 degrees by a thermal vent. Getting in and out of the pool was a shock to the system, but it felt so good to lie in the sand and ease away the previous night’s chill. When we arrived, there were only a few people in the springs, but by the time we ate breakfast and made ready to head out on the road, there were over ten tour groups there. Jeeps and Toyotas with backpacks, gas tanks, and the end of four days’ provisions on top made a neat little line in front of the visitor’s center, all with their tailgates open serving breakfast. In such a alien landscape, the presence of these man-made machines felt odd. I could have been at a football game, in the parking lot of a suburban supermarket, or on a used car lot, but I wasn’t. I was in the middle of a desert, over a mile above sea level, in Bolivia.
Much of the Reserve is desert: rocks carved into fantastical shapes by the sometimes harsh windstorms. One of the stops on our tour was the Arbol de Piedra, a tree-like stone that balances on a thin “trunk” eroded by centuries of flying sand. But my favorite part of the desert, without fail, was the Desierto de Dalí. On our third day, somewhat disoriented by our 4:45 wakeup call, I managed to remember to put on my Dalí t-shirt, prepared to honor one of my favorite artists in the desert named after him. When we arrived that afternoon in the aforementioned location, I immediately understoon the etymology. The rolling sand and mountains melted into a flat expanse of smooth sand, occasionally dotted with huge wind-carved boulders. All it needed was a few elephants on stilts and dripping clocks to make it a real Dalí painting. I asked Eddie, the guide, to stop for a few moments so that I could run out to the rocks and take a few ridiculous pictures of me in my yellow and purple t-shirt pointing excitedly at the rocks. He probably thought I was a bit nuts. Well, I guess he was right. However silly that was, I am quite glad that I have the pictures, because a budget laundromat in Cusco relieved me of my t-shirt, to my great woe.
As our blue 4x4 sped through Dalí’s canvas, our trip to Uyuni came to an end. We bumped our way back over the rocky hills, eventually arriving at the “International Highway” that the Bolivian and Chilean governments built to truck chemicals from the Salar to processing plants in Chile. It is a large gravel road. Our small group exchanged emails to keep in touch, and then in a flurry of dust and backpacks, separated in Uyuni as the three Canadians rushed to catch a bus to Potosí. D and I went back to our hotel, brushed the salt and sand off our bags, and took a long-anticipated hot shower.
I hadn’t even been the one that was excited about the Uyuni tour, and I was sceptical about the amount of effort it would take just to see some salt. But it wasn’t just the Salar that was beautiful. Being in a wild place with a local guide to share his knowledge was well worth the hassle of finding and getting to Uyuni. I am so glad that I stumbled upon this natural marvel while it is still under the radar of international tourism. It should remain relatively isolated for a while longer, until Uyui’s infrastructure steps up to accommodate more luxurious tours and hotels. It is truly a place that is out of this world.
Our transition from Argentina to Boliva was quite horrible, yet uneventful. The bus dropped us off in the border town of La Quiaca at 5:30 am, where a helpful sign under a buzzing streetlight told us that we were 5000 kilometers from Ushuaia, the southernmost city in Argentina. We thought the border opened at 7:00, but it was unclear whether this was Bolivian time or Argentine time, as they are an hour apart in the summer. Luckily, it’s nice and toasty in summer, right? This is true most of the time, but unfortunately when you’re at 3460 meters above sea level, it’s freaking cold at night. So there we were, shivering on the border in the dark with a handful of backpackers and several families carrying even more stuff than we had in our backpacks. I had hope at sunrise, when the cold abated slightly, but we still had another hour of waiting before we figured out that the officials were operating on Bolivian time. Finally we got our exit and entry stamps, filled out the requisite paperwork and entered Villazón, the gateway to Boliva!
I can say with some margin of error that I never in my life wish to return to Villazón. The ten hours that we spent in that god-forsaken town were the longest I’ve experienced in quite some time. They are perhaps rivalled by the 12 hours of FCAT and pre-FCAT testing, proctoring angry adolescents in my first year of teaching. The frigid sky of the previous sleepless night filled with cancer rays of death by 9:00 am, threatening to turn my nordic skin into a lobster carapace. There were no restaurants. There were no grocery stores. The only sustenance we had was granola and water. I cannot even begin to describe my ecstasy when we walked into the train station at 7:45 am to find that the only train that day left at 3:30 pm. After we drank the water that we had, there were no public bathrooms. The restrooms in the train station closed down at 10:00 am, and there were no ATMs to get bolivian money so that we could pay for other bathrooms in undisclosed or sketchy locations. The one saving grace was that we arrived on a Saturday, when there was a train leaving, instead of Sunday. I shudder to think what would have happened if our schedule had been just one day off.
Luckily, the trip to Uyuni was well worth the agony at the border. The train itself was quite pleasant; we opened up our panoramic window in first class and watched the red mountains of northern Argentina bake into the bronze peaks of the Bolivian Andes. Every once in a while a fertile valley complete with weeping willows and flocks of grazing sheep would peek out from behind the hillsides, and the train would clickety clack on. We saw arid plains with desert grasses, farm towns, dried riverbeds, steeply carved sandstone valleys, and the beginning of the altiplano: Bolivia’s high altitude plains. They even served us a meal in the dining car as part of our swank ticket, making up for the lack of food in Villazón. Potatoes, specifically fried, featured significantly in the meal. I have become quite used to seeing french fries at every meal here in Bolivia, with the exception of a few culinary treasures in Potosí, Sucre, and Copacabana. At the time, I cared not that the American tuber was my primary source of calories.
After a leisurely trip, we stepped off into the cold night air of Uyuni at midnight. Immediately, as in Cafayate, a tour agent accosted us. This time, she was advertising not only a tour company, but a hostel as well. I laughed when I told her we already had reservations at her hotel, but was glad for the company on the deserted streets. We slept well that night, after nearly 28 hours of sleepless traveling. When we awoke, we discovered that Uyuni in the morning isn’t a whole lot different than Uyuni at midnight. I think that the only time that the town is really busy is during the weekend street market. In this sense the town is much same as Villazón...unfortunately, we didn’t need a haunch of raw llama meat that Saturday morning.
We did need a tour company, money, and breakfast. As there were no ATM’s in Uyuni either, #2 nearly became an issue, but of course #1 had all their prices in US dollars, and we didn’t really have time for #3 because we found out the night before that all tours leave at 10:30 am, regardless of the company.
At this moment, I would like to elaborate on the process of choosing #1. In the past five years or so Uyuni has become a tourist mecca, drawing adventurers from all over the world in search of impressive scenery. To meet this demand, dozens of private tour companies have sprung up. Essentially anyone with a Toyota 4x4 (cuatro por cuatro...as we heard many a time in the next few days) put a sign up and called themselves a tour agency. The guidebooks essentially say that it’s blind luck if you get a great company or a lemon of a truck that breaks down in the middle of a desert or on the mountainside, if your food makes you sick or gets you going in the morning, or if the people in your group are psychopaths or your next best friends. We were also warned that sometimes in order to complete the magic group of 6 that fits in the two back seats of the SUV, you may sign up with one tour company, pay them, and then end up in some other company’s car. This very same thing happened to us, although we were completely ignorant of the fact until we arrived back at the tour company’s “office” 4 days later, but the office had a different name and was on a different street.
The fact that we didn’t actually go with the tour company in the book with the cute name and professional brochure was irrelevant, for we were utterly and miraculously lucky on all parts of our trip. The other four passengers were pleasant, sociable, and not at all obnoxious: a Dutch student and three French Canadians from Montreal volunteering for OxFam in Boliva. The car didn’t break down at all, save one flat tire on the very last day only a few kilometers from the city. The food was nourishing if uninspired; there were vegetables at every meal, and we had llama steaks the first afternoon for lunch, quite the novelty. Our guide Eddie was cheerful without being grating, and knew the spiderwebs of dirt roads like a National Geographic map. He found us wildlife, made sure we got to the sights ahead of other tour groups, and drove like a sane person around mountain curves. He and the cook, Elba, warmed up to us gringos as the trip went on, making for quite a pleasant social dynamic among the 8 of us. Luckily, all of us spoke Spanish, so most of the trip was spent conversing in that language, with smatterings of English, French, even Dutch and German thrown in.
Once we loaded up the 4x4, threw our backpacks on top to be wrapped in a tarp and squeezed ourselves into the two back seats of the truck. I had an open mind, expecting to learn a great deal about a part of the world very foreign to my home. All my life I have lived by the ocean. I’m quite attached to it, and get lonely if I can’t see waves for a few weeks. In Bolivia, I didn’t expect to find anything that resembled the ocean, and knew in some part of my mind that being nearly 4000 meters above my beloved Atlantic would be quite different.
But before we could see the sights, as with all good tours, we had to stop and be accosted by merchants trying to sell you things that you don’t really need. Honestly, does anyone require a figurine of a llama carved out of a salt block? Uyuni is not known for its textiles, the blankets, camera bags, and hats for sale were probably produced on a machine. Instead of participating in the market, I chose instead to make friends with a domesticated vicuña, one of the local camelids, who was happily munching on carrot pieces outside. This was my first ever vicuña sighting, so I was fairly excited to see the rare mammal and be able to pet its valuable fur. Vicuñas are shy animals who the Quechua and Aymara people indigenous to Peru and Bolivia domesticated into the docile alpaca. This one, our guide told us, had most likely been raised in captivity and hand-fed. My new friend was clearly more interested in her carrots than she was in me, so she wandered off in search of more tasty nibbles after a few minutes of me following her around with my camera.
Por fin, as they say here, we entered the Salar. The dusty roads turned whiter and more compact as we left town, crystallizing into one of the largest salt flats in the world. According to geological history, most of Bolivia and northern Argentina were once covered by an inland sea called Lake Minchin. When the Andes popped up some time after the dinosaurs died out during the Cenozoic Era, parts of the sea rushed out to join the Atlantic forming valleys like the Quebrada de Cafayate ], and the rest of it just dried up. Thus was formed the more than 10,000 square km Salar of Uyuni, the world’s largest. Try and put that in your salt shaker.
The air was dry and clear, with clouds billowing far away on the horizon near the mountains that circle the Salar. Perspective becomes quickly distorted out in the salar, because the horizon is uniformly flat for miles; the Andes in the distance never seemed to move during the first few hours that we spent in the car, but somehow we were moving forward. Then in front of us dark blobs materialized out of the shimmering sky which floated on top of the salt flats. As we moved closer, I realized that they were “islands” in the ancient sea, rock formations isolated in the middle of the Salar. One of the largest ones was our next destination, Isla del Pescado (Fish Island), so named because from afar it resembles a fish swimming on top of the salt.
But before we reached the island we had another stop: the Hoted de Sal (Salt Hotel). The novelty of these accomodations, miles away from running water, roads, or civilization, is that the entire building and its furnishings are built of salt. The walls are salt blocks, the floors are crushed salt granules, and the tables are massive slabs of salt. Even the chairs are carved salt. The only non-salt parts of the building were the straw roof and the wooden doors for each room. We spent the first night in another, less-famous, hotel made of salt on the outskirts of the Salar, for a much reduced fee. The bathrooms cost twice as much as in Uyuni, and bottle of cold Coke carried a 200% markup in the Salar’s Salt Hotel. After a brief tour of the building, it was back to the car.
As the sun reached its zenith, we took our midday break. Isla del Pescado turned from a fish into a large rock formation, a small mountain covered in over 6,000 cardón cacti. I wouldn’t have thought that anything could live in the middle of so much salt, but the island itself was teeming with life. The cacti were in bloom, their creamy yellow blossoms feeding insects and small birds, rodents scrambled about under rocks, and lizards skittered under rocks as we walked up the main path to pay our park entrance fee. A short hike up to the summit provided incredible views of salt as far as the eye could see. Everyone was panting on the relatively easy walk, and at the time I didn’t realize why I felt so tired. That evening as I lay curled in my bed with a nasty bout of altitude sickness, I came to fully appreciate the workout your body recieves just fulfilling ordinary tasks at 3.6000 meters above sea level. When we descended to the parking area, lunch was already set up and waiting: pan-seared llama steaks with rice and vegetables, with the ubiquitous Coca Cola as refreshment. The llama was surprisingly delicious, tasting slightly like a porkchop, but different.
After lunch, we followed a pair of grey week tracks across the Salar to its western border. There, to my surprise, was a small village sustained by agriculture and the occasional tour group. Whoever decided to farm right next to a salt flat must have loved a challenge; the tiny quinua plants were struggling to find water and nutrients in the harsh earth. Not twenty yards away from the fields the whiteness of the Salar stretched menacingly over the horizon, defying anyting to survive in its bounds. I watched in amazement as the road passed by field after field, finally ending at our own small Salt Hotel.
Amazed by the strange landscape, several of our group decided to make an expedition up the nearest hill before the sun set, to see if we could find any interesting views. I grabbed my camera while other more seasoned hikers packed water and flashlights, and then we were off. When we left the rustic hotel, I noticed that there were large rounded rock formations all along the path, much the same as on Isla del Pescado. I stopped to investigate one more closely, and realized from its texture and pattern that it was fossilized coral. The “islands” in the salar are the petrified remains of a coral reef, physical evidence of the sea that left Bolivia millions of years ago. When my eyes returned to the landscape, I started to imagine things from a completely different perspective. The towering cylindrical cacti were now kelp, the dried tumbleweed turned to sea-fans, and the tan dirt became the undulating sand of the sea-floor. The desert on the hillside was analagous to the ocean that it had once been, just drier. The land has retained most of the physical features of a reef and ocean bottom, but you don’t need scuba gear to wander through this mysterious terrain, only a pair of hiking boots. We made it halfway up the nearest peak before we realized that it was more than an afternoon hike. As the sun sank behind the other side of the mountain, we began our way back down, hoping we would make it back to the hotel before dark. It was a good deal easier going down than up, so we had plenty of tiime to spare. We also spotted a vizcacha, an Andean chinchilla, and her baby, a treat at the end of our hike. The odd appearance of the animal added to the surreal nature of the scenery: vizcachas are a strange mix of squirrel and rabbit with long ears, strong legs, and a long fluffy tail. Their grey coloring blends perfectly with the rocks, where they hop along looking for food in the evening. Unfortunately, I overexerted myself, not being accustomed to the effects of altitude on my body, so I headed immediately to bed with a splitting headache.
The next day we headed out early to see our first volcano. Ollague is one of three volcanoes in the Salar area which is sharded with Chile. One face of the volcano is considered Bolivian property, the other Chilean. Both countries work the surrounding land, mining various chemicals which provide considerable income. After a brief look at Ollague’s smoking peak, we headed south to our destination of the day: Reserva Natural de Flora y Fauna Eduardo Avaroa. Even for native Spanish speakers, it’s a mouthful. Little did I know when we set out, but the “Salar” tour isn’t really a tour of the Salar. Only the first day of a four day trip is spent in the Salar de Uyuni; the rest is a circuit of southwestern Bolivia, touching the Chilean border before heading back north to Uyuni.
The Eduardo Avaroa Nature Reserve is a large semi-desert area filled with rock formations, and more famously, dozens of lagoons. These lagoons vary in color from deep blue to briliant red, depending on their mineral deposits. At the entrance of the park is Laguna Colorada (Red Lagoon), so named for its coppery depths, due to a hgh concentration of iron. Seventy thousand mating pairs of flamingos make their home there during the rainy season, so when we arrived in the morning the shores of the lake were peppered with birds filtering out their breakfast. From the view point on a cliff above the lake, the red color was even more pronounced, highlighting the light pink flamingos. I would have expected that many birds to make more noise, but they didn’t seem to mind a few humans wandering around. We watched from afar, and then piled back into the car for an entire day of flamingos and lagoon-hopping. At the next lagoon, colored by sulfur and boric acid instead of Laguna Colorada’s red iron, were able to see the birds from closer up; I stalked through the tall paja reeds along the spongy shore in search of the closest photo I could take without scaring the flock. We lunched near another strong smelling sulfuric lagoon, amidst grazing vicuñas and more flamingoes.
The vicuña, which seemed almost abundant in the Reserve, was hunted to near extinction by the early 20th century, and is just beginning to come back. About the size of a pony, with pointy ears and huge goofy eyes, the vicuña has a coat as soft and as valuable as cashmere. One animal produces about 8 grams of wool every two years. Because it is a wild animal, it can’t be shorn in the same way that alpacas or llamas can; it needs to keep a layer of hair to protect itself from the extremes of temperatures on the altiplano. Opportunistic fur traders used to kill vicuñas to take their hides, but this is now prohibited. Bolivia, Chile, and Peru, which share the Atacama Desert that this diminuative camelid calls home, have made great conservation efforts to protect and breed vicuñas. the Eduardo Avaroa Reserve now has several hundred vicuñas that wander the grounds, eating desert shrubs and surviving on what little fresh water they can find.
When the sun set on our second day in the park, I wished I had a vicuña coat of my own: the temperature fell dramatically after a vibrant desert sunset. During the day, the weather was pleasant: in the 80’s under the blazing sun, considerably cooler in the shade. At night, however, it fell to the 40’s and the wind whipped away whatever warmth I might have saved from the midday sun. I was shocked at how cold it was on the altiplano, considering that it was nearly midsummer. My fragile little body, accustomed to balmier climes, would be destroyed in a Bolivian winter.
It was still quite cold when we left our tiny cabin in the Reserve on the third day of the tour. We had to start driving at 5:00 am in order to reach the natural geysers at sunup; the cold morning air makes the steamy jets more dramatic. Our group arrived right on schedule, the second of dozens of trucks passing by the second to last stop on the regular Uyuni route. The air around the geyser field was warm and toasty, quite the relief to the earlier chill. Unfortunately, it reeked of sulfur and the other chemicals found in abundance near the Salar. The geysers sprang up out of pits of boiling mud several feet deep; there must have been at least twenty of them spread out over an acre of sand, giving the landscape a lunar feel in the grey and red light of dawn. People wandered in and out of the steam, disappearing for a moment and then materializing several feet from where they had been. All of this, on just a few hours’ sleep, was quite the sight. But we didn’t stay long at the geysers—breakfast waited for us at the hotsprings!
A ten minute drive from the geysers was another lagoon, still full of flamingoes and chemicals, but naturally heated to 95 degrees by a thermal vent. Getting in and out of the pool was a shock to the system, but it felt so good to lie in the sand and ease away the previous night’s chill. When we arrived, there were only a few people in the springs, but by the time we ate breakfast and made ready to head out on the road, there were over ten tour groups there. Jeeps and Toyotas with backpacks, gas tanks, and the end of four days’ provisions on top made a neat little line in front of the visitor’s center, all with their tailgates open serving breakfast. In such a alien landscape, the presence of these man-made machines felt odd. I could have been at a football game, in the parking lot of a suburban supermarket, or on a used car lot, but I wasn’t. I was in the middle of a desert, over a mile above sea level, in Bolivia.
Much of the Reserve is desert: rocks carved into fantastical shapes by the sometimes harsh windstorms. One of the stops on our tour was the Arbol de Piedra, a tree-like stone that balances on a thin “trunk” eroded by centuries of flying sand. But my favorite part of the desert, without fail, was the Desierto de Dalí. On our third day, somewhat disoriented by our 4:45 wakeup call, I managed to remember to put on my Dalí t-shirt, prepared to honor one of my favorite artists in the desert named after him. When we arrived that afternoon in the aforementioned location, I immediately understoon the etymology. The rolling sand and mountains melted into a flat expanse of smooth sand, occasionally dotted with huge wind-carved boulders. All it needed was a few elephants on stilts and dripping clocks to make it a real Dalí painting. I asked Eddie, the guide, to stop for a few moments so that I could run out to the rocks and take a few ridiculous pictures of me in my yellow and purple t-shirt pointing excitedly at the rocks. He probably thought I was a bit nuts. Well, I guess he was right. However silly that was, I am quite glad that I have the pictures, because a budget laundromat in Cusco relieved me of my t-shirt, to my great woe.
As our blue 4x4 sped through Dalí’s canvas, our trip to Uyuni came to an end. We bumped our way back over the rocky hills, eventually arriving at the “International Highway” that the Bolivian and Chilean governments built to truck chemicals from the Salar to processing plants in Chile. It is a large gravel road. Our small group exchanged emails to keep in touch, and then in a flurry of dust and backpacks, separated in Uyuni as the three Canadians rushed to catch a bus to Potosí. D and I went back to our hotel, brushed the salt and sand off our bags, and took a long-anticipated hot shower.
I hadn’t even been the one that was excited about the Uyuni tour, and I was sceptical about the amount of effort it would take just to see some salt. But it wasn’t just the Salar that was beautiful. Being in a wild place with a local guide to share his knowledge was well worth the hassle of finding and getting to Uyuni. I am so glad that I stumbled upon this natural marvel while it is still under the radar of international tourism. It should remain relatively isolated for a while longer, until Uyui’s infrastructure steps up to accommodate more luxurious tours and hotels. It is truly a place that is out of this world.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Cafayate: The Back Country
Salta, while linda, is also still a city, and as I learned from our friendly historian it is important to change your perspective to seek new definitions. There are so many forms of beauty, the cosmopolitan, the urban, the historical, the academic, and you find different types of beauty in all of these contexts. In our travels, we have seen much of the structured, human-created types of beauty, but what we had not yet experienced was rural beauty. In this vein, a daytrip was in order. Our slightly limited time schedule lead us to choose Cafayate, a small town about 180 km south of Salta.
We dragged ourselves out of bed at an ungodly hour to catch (just barely, because D forgot his camera in the apartment) the 7:00 bus to Cafayate. The bus transverses a local commuter and tourist route, highway 68, which is famous for its scenery. As we passed out of the mountain valley of Salta Capital, the first golden rays of morning gilded the lush surrounding land. We whizzed by horse farms, sprawling plots of unknown green leafy produce, and the occasional wild area. Gradually, the valley sucked the water out of the land; as we climbed higher the abundant trees and bushes disappeared, replaced by steep ochre slopes.
I struggled to stay awake through the Quebrada de Cafayate, a prehistoric valley created when the Andes pushed a prehistoric sea out of the middle of South America. Even though we returned later that afternoon with a guide, I’m glad that I got to see the hillsides lit up in the early morning.
Half dead by the time our bus pulled in, we found that the town was dead too. A smattering of tourists strolled through the tree-lined central plaza, and we soon discovered that there wasn’t much more to the town of Cafayate than that. An overly enthusiastic tour organizer accosted us not two blocks from the bus station, and at that point I wasn’t in the mood to think coherently nor make decisions. We ate a tranquil breakfast of local bread and goat cheese in the shade, and then made plans. To my dismay, the very same obnoxious tourism agent was the only one recommended at all by either of our guides, and the office actually looked reputable. We booked spots on the one tour of the day and then walked down the approximately nine square blocks that comprise the town.
The one “not to be missed” spot in the guidebook was an intriguing icecream store. Cafayate has a burgeoning (or perhaps just struggling) wine culture, and one special store makes granitas from Cafayate’s two wines. Excellent, a great way to pass the noon hour. We grabbed a table in the shade and I began to savor my truly delicious cabernet sauvignon granita. Since it was a slow day, the owner came outside and sat with us. “How cute!” I thought, we’re having a provincial experience; chatting with the purveyor of these fine comestibles on a dusty street in windswept Cafayate, Argentina. The conversation was fairly mundane to begin with, and Dave got to practice his Spanish a little with someone other than me.
Then, in a less than congenial turn, he told us “You know there are bad people out in the world. There is a lot of evil going on.” Umm, sure? Nod and smile, nod and smile. Actually, it was pretty difficult for me to get in touch with the evils of the world on a sunny afteroon in a quaint sleepy town. Not wanting to be rude, since we were eating his icecream and sitting in his café, we put up with another twenty minutes of less ambiguously directed malice: according to him, unemployment didn’t exist, only lazy (aka poor/indigenous) people; the Muslim/Arab community is the embodiment of evil on earth (he wasn’t clear on a distinction); Jews are bad too, for uncertain reasons; Hitler and the Japanese Kamakazi bombers inspired the modern proliferation of jihads; and the world in general is going to hell. Well, that was uplifting. So much for my endearing icecream maker.
We fled the scene as soon as another customer came into the store, waving frantically and sending hasty “Ciao’s” in farewell as we escaped. I guess you can find bigots all over the world.
Lunch around the deserted central plaza was much more pleasant: a perfect Argentine light meal. My first real lomito, the mother of all steak sandwiches, was fantastic. A medium flank steak cooked on a grill with all the fixings: cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, a fried egg, mustard, and aioli. Whew. It proved to be excellent fuel for our afternoon hike out into the country along highway 68.
We piled into a van with 14 other nature-loving tourists (4 more people were shoved in the tour guide’s brother’s car that drove along behind) to a series of puntos de interés (points of interest) along the road that would eventually take us back to Salta, clean showers, and a comfortable bed. Apparently, it was “no problem” catching the bus midway, we’d have “plenty of time” to see the last landmark, and everything would be fine. That was before five of us credulous tourists were sprinting down a rocky gully out of the Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat) after the last bus of the evening, which was slowly moving down the road without us. But I get ahead of myself.
An incredibly energetic but oblivious guide lead us through beautiful country full of geological wonders, while warning us in very rapid Spanish not to touch the dangerous shoe-puncturing cacti or we would be sick for 28 days in a hospital, if we weren’t already dead. 15 seconds after this warning, a small middle-aged French woman tromped on one with her army-surplus boots. Clearly, she missed that. I appreciated the knowledge and exuberance of our guide, but doubted his sincerity. One man, a fellow Argentine, mentioned that he was trying to start a cactus garden at home, and the guide immediately offered to dig up some specimens and mail them to him. Generous, yet strange. Our group was a little large to really appreciate the scenery; there were constantly people’s heads, feet, or arms in my scenic pictures, but I got over it.
We sloshed barefoot through mudflats to see a swallow rookery in red cliffs, walked on the ancient seafloor through crumbling sandstone valleys, crunched crystallized plaster in our fingers, and watched the clouds turn the mountainsides from dusty brown to blood-red, dark olive to vivid green, dull sand to bright gold. The mineral-rich area was filled with copper, iron, and sulfur ores, which gives the land dramatic swaths of color. At times the land on the horizon was flat as a board, stacks of earth that lay still for millenia; in other places, the layer cake of rocks and minerals twisted like bunched fabric or jutted up from the ground in jagged angles. We zipped from site to site in our van and auxilary car, piling in and out like clowns in a circus with the guide all the while enthusiastically yelling “¡Vamos, señores turistas nacionales e internacionales!”
I knew that there was a schedule to the tour, as we were planning on meeting a bus at the end, but I had no idea how closely it was being followed. As a French couple (who could speak Spanish, as opposed to the crazy small lady) lingered over a vendor of hippie necklaces at “El Anfiteatro,” (The Amphitheater) an echoing canyon, our guide’s mood altered slightly from manically excited to slightly worried. I dug my watch out of my pack and saw that we had about 20 minutes until the bus was supposed to be at our next geological site, the Garganta del Diablo. We scrambled up a rock face, saw the Devil’s throat, although I’m still not sure why it’s called that—we didn’t exactly have time to wait around for our guide’s commentary—and sprinted the last 200 meters down to the road to catch the last bus back to Salta as the sun sank over the mountains.
Five of us tourists joined the young mothers with babies, tired farmers and construction workers, grandmothers, and other local travellers on the colectivo, the municipal bus which runs from Cafayate to Salta and points between. I think everyone on the bus had a long day, regardless of their daily activities; everyone was ready to sleep. We grabbed some hot and juicy empanadas at the bus rest stop, gobbled them down and nodded off to the swaying of the bus winding its way back around the mountainsides back to Salta.
I was pretty pleased with our first outing into the country. It was not exactly what I had expected, but the day gave us a glimpse into rural culture on several levels. The transplant icecream maker turned out to be more back-country than the indigenous people living from the earth. Our first organized tour was pleasant, and went relatively smoothly; the change of scenery was excellent, exactly what we wanted. We saw strange and beautiful things out in the country. On a tactile level, felt good to walk about on the earth again, instead of on bricks, asphalt, or concrete.
The hot shower and comfortable beds in seemingly cosmopolitan Salta comforted our tired bodies at the end of the three hour bus ride and the long climb up the hill to our apartment, an apt reward for a dusty day among rocks and cacti. It was a short jaunt, and good warm-up for what would come next in our journey as we continued on northwards, further from the glittering city lights of Buenos Aires and the bustling streets of Salta into our first new country: Bolivia.
We dragged ourselves out of bed at an ungodly hour to catch (just barely, because D forgot his camera in the apartment) the 7:00 bus to Cafayate. The bus transverses a local commuter and tourist route, highway 68, which is famous for its scenery. As we passed out of the mountain valley of Salta Capital, the first golden rays of morning gilded the lush surrounding land. We whizzed by horse farms, sprawling plots of unknown green leafy produce, and the occasional wild area. Gradually, the valley sucked the water out of the land; as we climbed higher the abundant trees and bushes disappeared, replaced by steep ochre slopes.
I struggled to stay awake through the Quebrada de Cafayate, a prehistoric valley created when the Andes pushed a prehistoric sea out of the middle of South America. Even though we returned later that afternoon with a guide, I’m glad that I got to see the hillsides lit up in the early morning.
Half dead by the time our bus pulled in, we found that the town was dead too. A smattering of tourists strolled through the tree-lined central plaza, and we soon discovered that there wasn’t much more to the town of Cafayate than that. An overly enthusiastic tour organizer accosted us not two blocks from the bus station, and at that point I wasn’t in the mood to think coherently nor make decisions. We ate a tranquil breakfast of local bread and goat cheese in the shade, and then made plans. To my dismay, the very same obnoxious tourism agent was the only one recommended at all by either of our guides, and the office actually looked reputable. We booked spots on the one tour of the day and then walked down the approximately nine square blocks that comprise the town.
The one “not to be missed” spot in the guidebook was an intriguing icecream store. Cafayate has a burgeoning (or perhaps just struggling) wine culture, and one special store makes granitas from Cafayate’s two wines. Excellent, a great way to pass the noon hour. We grabbed a table in the shade and I began to savor my truly delicious cabernet sauvignon granita. Since it was a slow day, the owner came outside and sat with us. “How cute!” I thought, we’re having a provincial experience; chatting with the purveyor of these fine comestibles on a dusty street in windswept Cafayate, Argentina. The conversation was fairly mundane to begin with, and Dave got to practice his Spanish a little with someone other than me.
Then, in a less than congenial turn, he told us “You know there are bad people out in the world. There is a lot of evil going on.” Umm, sure? Nod and smile, nod and smile. Actually, it was pretty difficult for me to get in touch with the evils of the world on a sunny afteroon in a quaint sleepy town. Not wanting to be rude, since we were eating his icecream and sitting in his café, we put up with another twenty minutes of less ambiguously directed malice: according to him, unemployment didn’t exist, only lazy (aka poor/indigenous) people; the Muslim/Arab community is the embodiment of evil on earth (he wasn’t clear on a distinction); Jews are bad too, for uncertain reasons; Hitler and the Japanese Kamakazi bombers inspired the modern proliferation of jihads; and the world in general is going to hell. Well, that was uplifting. So much for my endearing icecream maker.
We fled the scene as soon as another customer came into the store, waving frantically and sending hasty “Ciao’s” in farewell as we escaped. I guess you can find bigots all over the world.
Lunch around the deserted central plaza was much more pleasant: a perfect Argentine light meal. My first real lomito, the mother of all steak sandwiches, was fantastic. A medium flank steak cooked on a grill with all the fixings: cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, a fried egg, mustard, and aioli. Whew. It proved to be excellent fuel for our afternoon hike out into the country along highway 68.
We piled into a van with 14 other nature-loving tourists (4 more people were shoved in the tour guide’s brother’s car that drove along behind) to a series of puntos de interés (points of interest) along the road that would eventually take us back to Salta, clean showers, and a comfortable bed. Apparently, it was “no problem” catching the bus midway, we’d have “plenty of time” to see the last landmark, and everything would be fine. That was before five of us credulous tourists were sprinting down a rocky gully out of the Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat) after the last bus of the evening, which was slowly moving down the road without us. But I get ahead of myself.
An incredibly energetic but oblivious guide lead us through beautiful country full of geological wonders, while warning us in very rapid Spanish not to touch the dangerous shoe-puncturing cacti or we would be sick for 28 days in a hospital, if we weren’t already dead. 15 seconds after this warning, a small middle-aged French woman tromped on one with her army-surplus boots. Clearly, she missed that. I appreciated the knowledge and exuberance of our guide, but doubted his sincerity. One man, a fellow Argentine, mentioned that he was trying to start a cactus garden at home, and the guide immediately offered to dig up some specimens and mail them to him. Generous, yet strange. Our group was a little large to really appreciate the scenery; there were constantly people’s heads, feet, or arms in my scenic pictures, but I got over it.
We sloshed barefoot through mudflats to see a swallow rookery in red cliffs, walked on the ancient seafloor through crumbling sandstone valleys, crunched crystallized plaster in our fingers, and watched the clouds turn the mountainsides from dusty brown to blood-red, dark olive to vivid green, dull sand to bright gold. The mineral-rich area was filled with copper, iron, and sulfur ores, which gives the land dramatic swaths of color. At times the land on the horizon was flat as a board, stacks of earth that lay still for millenia; in other places, the layer cake of rocks and minerals twisted like bunched fabric or jutted up from the ground in jagged angles. We zipped from site to site in our van and auxilary car, piling in and out like clowns in a circus with the guide all the while enthusiastically yelling “¡Vamos, señores turistas nacionales e internacionales!”
I knew that there was a schedule to the tour, as we were planning on meeting a bus at the end, but I had no idea how closely it was being followed. As a French couple (who could speak Spanish, as opposed to the crazy small lady) lingered over a vendor of hippie necklaces at “El Anfiteatro,” (The Amphitheater) an echoing canyon, our guide’s mood altered slightly from manically excited to slightly worried. I dug my watch out of my pack and saw that we had about 20 minutes until the bus was supposed to be at our next geological site, the Garganta del Diablo. We scrambled up a rock face, saw the Devil’s throat, although I’m still not sure why it’s called that—we didn’t exactly have time to wait around for our guide’s commentary—and sprinted the last 200 meters down to the road to catch the last bus back to Salta as the sun sank over the mountains.
Five of us tourists joined the young mothers with babies, tired farmers and construction workers, grandmothers, and other local travellers on the colectivo, the municipal bus which runs from Cafayate to Salta and points between. I think everyone on the bus had a long day, regardless of their daily activities; everyone was ready to sleep. We grabbed some hot and juicy empanadas at the bus rest stop, gobbled them down and nodded off to the swaying of the bus winding its way back around the mountainsides back to Salta.
I was pretty pleased with our first outing into the country. It was not exactly what I had expected, but the day gave us a glimpse into rural culture on several levels. The transplant icecream maker turned out to be more back-country than the indigenous people living from the earth. Our first organized tour was pleasant, and went relatively smoothly; the change of scenery was excellent, exactly what we wanted. We saw strange and beautiful things out in the country. On a tactile level, felt good to walk about on the earth again, instead of on bricks, asphalt, or concrete.
The hot shower and comfortable beds in seemingly cosmopolitan Salta comforted our tired bodies at the end of the three hour bus ride and the long climb up the hill to our apartment, an apt reward for a dusty day among rocks and cacti. It was a short jaunt, and good warm-up for what would come next in our journey as we continued on northwards, further from the glittering city lights of Buenos Aires and the bustling streets of Salta into our first new country: Bolivia.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Salta La Linda
When you enter the town of Salta, the eponymous capital city of the province, a poem greets you on Rt. 9 in the same bright green and reflective white of U.S. highway signs:
And the sign has it right. When you drive through the pass, verdant mountains give way to a large flat valley where the white city of Salta, Argentina rests peacefully under sunny skies. I, of course, didn’t see this beautiful view when we arrived, because it was 7:00 am after a 12 hour bus ride. Fortunately, the apartment we rented was nestled comfortably on the Portezuelo, the south side of the mountain, just a few minutes’ walk from the panorama.
Salta is a bustling city of 100,000 residents which bridges several important cultures in Argentina. There are a few wealthy people who probably own houses in Buenos Aires and drive BMW’s; some true gauchos, the Argentine wrangler and rancher; and the northernmost extreme of the country still shows traces of the great Inca empire, whose fingers reached here in the 15th century. This mixture of cultures makes a salteño, as the local residents prefer to be called.
Finally we had a real shower and to our utter surprise, maid service! I awoke bleary-eyed at 10 the morning after our all-night bus ride and had trouble understanding that the woman outside wanted to clean our apartment and give us fresh towels. The next day we were better prepared; we planned an excursion to the Cerro de San Bernardo, the mountaintop behind our house.
Armed with cameras and water, we started up the winding highway that curls around the mountainside accompanied by a few dozen other salteños in search of a hard workout or a trip with the family. After two hours of hiking amidst tamarisk trees, bromeliads, and blazing sun we arrived at the top. We could have taken the cable cars up, but that would have cost money that was beyond our slightly stretched budget. In any case, the journey up was worth it, if exhausting. We rewarded ourselves with a café con leche at the lookout cafe, perched directly above downtown and looking out into the green hills beyond the city limits. Not a bad way to spend the afternoon. Also included in the quite popular mountaintop park was a gym with free weights, a playground, an algae filled neon green waterfall, an antique silver exhibit (closed), local handicraft vendors, and several more miradores, or overlooks.
On the way back down, we took the traditional stone staircase of 1070 steps and the 12 stations of the cross illustrated at various stopping points. My jelly-like knees, not accustomed to tromping around mountains, were pretty tuckered by the time we reached the end. Unfortunately, the steps came out on the southwest side of the mountain, and our comfortable beds and chairs awaited on the southern slope. Valiant souls, we attempted to pick our way through the streets, but this section of the town lay outside our puny guidebook maps. The street that seemed to go in the direction that we wanted ended abruptly in a pile of grass and construction material, but we were determined that this was the way home. Then the path that lead through the brush ended too, and there we were, traipsing about the mountainside with only a vague idea of how we were going to get both east and down to a shower and fresh towels. We picked our way through the remains of a brush fire, trespassed on the water treatment facility, and slid down a 20 meter rock face, just barely making it back before dark.
We slept well that night.
Not daunted by our perhaps foolish daring on the mountainside, we chose for our next adventure another destination outside the city limits. The Mercado Artesanal (Artisan’s Market), so our book told us, lay just outside Salta on bus routes 7, 2, or 3. Excellent. A plan. We hop on bus 2A and for maybe five minutes it’s going in the right direction. Then it turns right and goes north. And keeps going north. Hmm. Our indulgent bus driver set us on the right path, and luckily the bus that we happened to board had a circular route. For our next try, we board 5A (N.B. 5A was not one of the options listed in our handy guide.) which has a promising sign on the front: “Mercado Artesanal.”
This expedition went smoother than the last one; we had a pleasant afternoon walking through stalls of textiles, metalwork, and other local crafts. Llama goods were predominant. We then went across the street to the fake Mercado Artesanal where other vendors showed off artesanía of dubious provenance. Somehow I don’t think that local indigeous craftspeople have nylon tags that they sew into finished goods. Yet despite its inauthentic products, the rip off Mercado was almost as interesting as the real thing. It’s amazing the crazy shit that people produce for toruists.
To cap off a bustling day we returned via bus to the city center to visit one museum before things closed down. We poked our heads in the Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña (MAAM), the High Andes Arqueological Museum, and were directed upstairs to the 3rd floor. There we paid a whopping 10 peso entrance fee apiece and went into a hyper-air-conditioned exhibit of Andean artifacts. Most of the display cases had to do with child sacrifice in the Inca empire; interesting, yet not exactly an all-encompassing narrative of pre-Columbian history. Half of the tiny museum was closed for repairs, so we finished our tour in about 10 minutes, even having read all the informative placards.
We were about to throw in the towel and head for home, rather unimpressed with the MAAM, when the small library on the 3rd floor caught my eye. I hesitantly ventured in to have a look around when an elderly man asked us if we wanted a brief history of Inca culture. Sure, I thought, it couldn’t hurt. There didn’t seem to be that many books, so he coudn’t possibly keep us there for long in such a perfunctory library.
Two hours later, when we signed the guest book and headed out, I began to fully comprehend the wealth of information in the library. Interestingly enough, the knowledge wasn’t in the shoddily laminated photographs, the well-worn book covers, or the few glossy coffee table books scattered on the shelves. The historian, Rubén, was the greatest asset that the library had.
Rubén invited us to sit down across from him at a formica table built for 10. I later learned that he had purposefully chosen not to sit at the center of either long side, nor at the head or foot of the table. He explained that in the tradition of Inca culture, the symbolism of placement is very important. He wanted us to feel welcome, and not as if he were the leader or most powerful person at the table. We were there for a conversation, for learning, and he did not want to appear imposing. At first, the discussion was much more one-sided, with a brief explanation of Inca symbolism and holy imagery.
Then, Rubén began to speak more holistically about Inca culture, and the influence that it still has in many people’s lives. In our first few months in South America, we came across very few indigenous people. The Spaniards pretty much wiped out Argentina, leaving the country open for European settlement. Now that we’ve moved further north, some of the things that the historian had to say make a lot of sense. It was fascinating to hear talk of unity and progress from a bookish old man in a museum; his advice about looking for similarities in people, rather than differences, was a sentiment that caught me off guard. I have tried to do so in my travels, but I confess that at times I feel more of an outsider than a compañera or hermana. It is difficult to blend in when all eyes notice the blonde hair and pale skin that marks me as different. One would think that after living in Miami and being a minority in the workplace I would be more prepared to look different, to be the odd one out, but I haven’t been. Salta was a transition for us, moving from the Big City to the Country, from westernized society to the Old World. Rubén’s advice about traveling and communities has been invaluable to me. I needed a brush up on my grade-school knowledge of American (not just US) history, and I needed to remember that one of the best tools the human mind has is its ability to change perspective. An active citizen of the world must constantly reevaluate his or her perception of the world, because it is most certainly not the only possible interpretation. You’re supposed to do this when you travel, yet at times it becomes difficult: habits are hard to break; there is comfort in routine and familiarity. In order to get to know new places, I’ve learned that you have to open your mind to different people and different points of view.
A lovely new perspective, worthy of Salta la Linda, is Rubén’s description of the Inca concept of time. I don’t think that it is particularly revolutionary, nor will is transform my way of life, but it is something different. The way he described the passage of time is that the past lies in front of you and the future behind. Puzzling? Paradoxical? Perhaps. All shall be revealed. As one walks forward, one uses history, prior knowlege, and one’s ancestors as the foundation for your path. Thus, you go up and around supported by your past. Eventually, though you never see it, you reach the future when you flip over again. It’s a bit like being on a mouse-wheel, but it’s you that’s turning, and not the wheel. An upward spiral. It’s quite different than the convenient time-line modeled in history books. For Rubén this paradigm is patently obvious. “You can’t see your future, right? Then why should it be in front of you? It is behind.” Of course, it all makes sense now.
I have a feeling that this trip, I will need to do quite a lot more thinking about my past in order to start working on my future. Having epiphanies about how little you know is not extraordinarily exceptional: humanity’s ambivalence between insignificance and dominion is part of modernity. What was extroardinary about our visit to the museum was that it filled me with a sense of purpose. With a calm but solid certainty, Rubén told us that it wasn’t chance that brought us into the museum, and that not everyone is willing to hear or lear about different cultures. I was beginning to feel a little directionless, even aimless in our travels, but to have a stranger look me in the eye and tell me “You have a purpose” was pretty heady. Even if all Rubén told us was that we should listen to other people and share our views along the road, these simple things were now embued with meaning, with significance. That simple fact gave me bit of comfort and made me feel less frivolous, less of the dreaded “tourist.” Trite, perhaps, but it made me feel better. We are engaged in a task of making connections and finding interesting places, which seems a whole lot more rewarding than being “on vacation.” I now have a mission, a task; not only do I bring commerce, luggage, and incovenience: I bring ideas, curiosity, change, and possibly understanding.
¿Qué linda, no?
Salta La Linda
Esta es mi Salta viajero
Cuando llegas por el Portezuelo
Parece que bajas del cielo
A este Valle de Lerma
De Castilla y Perdiguero
Salta the BeautifulThis is my Salta, traveler.
When you arrive at the Portezuelo,
It’s as if you’ve stepped down from heaven
To this Valley of Lerma
Of Castilla and Perdiguero.
And the sign has it right. When you drive through the pass, verdant mountains give way to a large flat valley where the white city of Salta, Argentina rests peacefully under sunny skies. I, of course, didn’t see this beautiful view when we arrived, because it was 7:00 am after a 12 hour bus ride. Fortunately, the apartment we rented was nestled comfortably on the Portezuelo, the south side of the mountain, just a few minutes’ walk from the panorama.
Salta is a bustling city of 100,000 residents which bridges several important cultures in Argentina. There are a few wealthy people who probably own houses in Buenos Aires and drive BMW’s; some true gauchos, the Argentine wrangler and rancher; and the northernmost extreme of the country still shows traces of the great Inca empire, whose fingers reached here in the 15th century. This mixture of cultures makes a salteño, as the local residents prefer to be called.
Finally we had a real shower and to our utter surprise, maid service! I awoke bleary-eyed at 10 the morning after our all-night bus ride and had trouble understanding that the woman outside wanted to clean our apartment and give us fresh towels. The next day we were better prepared; we planned an excursion to the Cerro de San Bernardo, the mountaintop behind our house.
Armed with cameras and water, we started up the winding highway that curls around the mountainside accompanied by a few dozen other salteños in search of a hard workout or a trip with the family. After two hours of hiking amidst tamarisk trees, bromeliads, and blazing sun we arrived at the top. We could have taken the cable cars up, but that would have cost money that was beyond our slightly stretched budget. In any case, the journey up was worth it, if exhausting. We rewarded ourselves with a café con leche at the lookout cafe, perched directly above downtown and looking out into the green hills beyond the city limits. Not a bad way to spend the afternoon. Also included in the quite popular mountaintop park was a gym with free weights, a playground, an algae filled neon green waterfall, an antique silver exhibit (closed), local handicraft vendors, and several more miradores, or overlooks.
On the way back down, we took the traditional stone staircase of 1070 steps and the 12 stations of the cross illustrated at various stopping points. My jelly-like knees, not accustomed to tromping around mountains, were pretty tuckered by the time we reached the end. Unfortunately, the steps came out on the southwest side of the mountain, and our comfortable beds and chairs awaited on the southern slope. Valiant souls, we attempted to pick our way through the streets, but this section of the town lay outside our puny guidebook maps. The street that seemed to go in the direction that we wanted ended abruptly in a pile of grass and construction material, but we were determined that this was the way home. Then the path that lead through the brush ended too, and there we were, traipsing about the mountainside with only a vague idea of how we were going to get both east and down to a shower and fresh towels. We picked our way through the remains of a brush fire, trespassed on the water treatment facility, and slid down a 20 meter rock face, just barely making it back before dark.
We slept well that night.
Not daunted by our perhaps foolish daring on the mountainside, we chose for our next adventure another destination outside the city limits. The Mercado Artesanal (Artisan’s Market), so our book told us, lay just outside Salta on bus routes 7, 2, or 3. Excellent. A plan. We hop on bus 2A and for maybe five minutes it’s going in the right direction. Then it turns right and goes north. And keeps going north. Hmm. Our indulgent bus driver set us on the right path, and luckily the bus that we happened to board had a circular route. For our next try, we board 5A (N.B. 5A was not one of the options listed in our handy guide.) which has a promising sign on the front: “Mercado Artesanal.”
This expedition went smoother than the last one; we had a pleasant afternoon walking through stalls of textiles, metalwork, and other local crafts. Llama goods were predominant. We then went across the street to the fake Mercado Artesanal where other vendors showed off artesanía of dubious provenance. Somehow I don’t think that local indigeous craftspeople have nylon tags that they sew into finished goods. Yet despite its inauthentic products, the rip off Mercado was almost as interesting as the real thing. It’s amazing the crazy shit that people produce for toruists.
To cap off a bustling day we returned via bus to the city center to visit one museum before things closed down. We poked our heads in the Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña (MAAM), the High Andes Arqueological Museum, and were directed upstairs to the 3rd floor. There we paid a whopping 10 peso entrance fee apiece and went into a hyper-air-conditioned exhibit of Andean artifacts. Most of the display cases had to do with child sacrifice in the Inca empire; interesting, yet not exactly an all-encompassing narrative of pre-Columbian history. Half of the tiny museum was closed for repairs, so we finished our tour in about 10 minutes, even having read all the informative placards.
We were about to throw in the towel and head for home, rather unimpressed with the MAAM, when the small library on the 3rd floor caught my eye. I hesitantly ventured in to have a look around when an elderly man asked us if we wanted a brief history of Inca culture. Sure, I thought, it couldn’t hurt. There didn’t seem to be that many books, so he coudn’t possibly keep us there for long in such a perfunctory library.
Two hours later, when we signed the guest book and headed out, I began to fully comprehend the wealth of information in the library. Interestingly enough, the knowledge wasn’t in the shoddily laminated photographs, the well-worn book covers, or the few glossy coffee table books scattered on the shelves. The historian, Rubén, was the greatest asset that the library had.
Rubén invited us to sit down across from him at a formica table built for 10. I later learned that he had purposefully chosen not to sit at the center of either long side, nor at the head or foot of the table. He explained that in the tradition of Inca culture, the symbolism of placement is very important. He wanted us to feel welcome, and not as if he were the leader or most powerful person at the table. We were there for a conversation, for learning, and he did not want to appear imposing. At first, the discussion was much more one-sided, with a brief explanation of Inca symbolism and holy imagery.
Then, Rubén began to speak more holistically about Inca culture, and the influence that it still has in many people’s lives. In our first few months in South America, we came across very few indigenous people. The Spaniards pretty much wiped out Argentina, leaving the country open for European settlement. Now that we’ve moved further north, some of the things that the historian had to say make a lot of sense. It was fascinating to hear talk of unity and progress from a bookish old man in a museum; his advice about looking for similarities in people, rather than differences, was a sentiment that caught me off guard. I have tried to do so in my travels, but I confess that at times I feel more of an outsider than a compañera or hermana. It is difficult to blend in when all eyes notice the blonde hair and pale skin that marks me as different. One would think that after living in Miami and being a minority in the workplace I would be more prepared to look different, to be the odd one out, but I haven’t been. Salta was a transition for us, moving from the Big City to the Country, from westernized society to the Old World. Rubén’s advice about traveling and communities has been invaluable to me. I needed a brush up on my grade-school knowledge of American (not just US) history, and I needed to remember that one of the best tools the human mind has is its ability to change perspective. An active citizen of the world must constantly reevaluate his or her perception of the world, because it is most certainly not the only possible interpretation. You’re supposed to do this when you travel, yet at times it becomes difficult: habits are hard to break; there is comfort in routine and familiarity. In order to get to know new places, I’ve learned that you have to open your mind to different people and different points of view.
A lovely new perspective, worthy of Salta la Linda, is Rubén’s description of the Inca concept of time. I don’t think that it is particularly revolutionary, nor will is transform my way of life, but it is something different. The way he described the passage of time is that the past lies in front of you and the future behind. Puzzling? Paradoxical? Perhaps. All shall be revealed. As one walks forward, one uses history, prior knowlege, and one’s ancestors as the foundation for your path. Thus, you go up and around supported by your past. Eventually, though you never see it, you reach the future when you flip over again. It’s a bit like being on a mouse-wheel, but it’s you that’s turning, and not the wheel. An upward spiral. It’s quite different than the convenient time-line modeled in history books. For Rubén this paradigm is patently obvious. “You can’t see your future, right? Then why should it be in front of you? It is behind.” Of course, it all makes sense now.
I have a feeling that this trip, I will need to do quite a lot more thinking about my past in order to start working on my future. Having epiphanies about how little you know is not extraordinarily exceptional: humanity’s ambivalence between insignificance and dominion is part of modernity. What was extroardinary about our visit to the museum was that it filled me with a sense of purpose. With a calm but solid certainty, Rubén told us that it wasn’t chance that brought us into the museum, and that not everyone is willing to hear or lear about different cultures. I was beginning to feel a little directionless, even aimless in our travels, but to have a stranger look me in the eye and tell me “You have a purpose” was pretty heady. Even if all Rubén told us was that we should listen to other people and share our views along the road, these simple things were now embued with meaning, with significance. That simple fact gave me bit of comfort and made me feel less frivolous, less of the dreaded “tourist.” Trite, perhaps, but it made me feel better. We are engaged in a task of making connections and finding interesting places, which seems a whole lot more rewarding than being “on vacation.” I now have a mission, a task; not only do I bring commerce, luggage, and incovenience: I bring ideas, curiosity, change, and possibly understanding.
¿Qué linda, no?
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Y Cordoba...?
Hmm. On the road. Our epic journey around the Southern Cone kicked off with both bang and bust. We made it out of our apartment, said goodbye to Borges and Palermo with one last meal from the pasta shop. The owner gave us a smile and free dessert, totally making my day and making up for the unorganized and less-friendly real estate company. Empanadas in hand, we taxi-ed over to the Estación de Omnibus with an elderly gentlman who remenisced about childhood language lessons and British accents. Not a bad way to leave the city.
Our bus ticket ended up being not one, not two, but THREE TIMES more expensive than either guidebook predicted, and I have a sinking feeling that all subsequent trips are going to be similar. I refuse to believe that the price of gas and travel has gone up that much in the past six months, and maintain that we are beings screwed in some way that remains unexplained.
Riding high in the second story of our Bus-Cama, we left Buenos Aires after the sun set and drove on into the night. Sleep was fitful, as can be expected, so the glowing sunrise woke us up somewhere in the countryside. The entire skyline was aglow with oranges and purples, but I just didn't have the energy to enjoy it.
A much less cheery taxi driver drove us to our hostel at 7:00 am this morning, supposedly dumping us off a block away. Try 5. Then, the room that we had reserved over a week in advance, and had received not one, not two, not three, but FOUR irrelevant follow-up confirmation emails was not there. Instead, we were given a room with a "private bathroom" read: strange partition with a 3.5 inch metal door which only opens from the outside. It's like showering in a safe, only it's meant to keep you in. I chose to douse the floor of our dormitory-style bedroom with water rather than be interred in a watery lock-box. Then, my shower ran out of cold water, scalding my tired body at 10:00 am when we finally were able to check into the hotel. Córdoba Backpackers Hostel is NOT on my list of favorite places right now.
The only minutely redeeming quality is the Wi-Fi connection...but it's only available in building #1, across the fucking street from our room! Ridiculous.
The city of Córdoba itself, much like its European counterpart, is a mixture of University town and old cathedrals. The Muslims and Catholics built the old one, but the Jesuits built the new one. It's a pretty city, smaller and a little less classy than the Capital Federal, but it grows on you.
In need of a pick-me-up after the disappointing morning, D and I hopped over to the mall for a little 007 action, just in time to catch the Argentinian premimer of Casino Royale. Loved the new Bond, loved the action, thought the styling was cheesy and trashy. What kind of Monte Carlo croupier would wear a satin vest embroidered with playing cards? We're not in Vegas here.
We followed our North American dose of pop with South American culture, visiting the small but interesting Regional Museum of Bellas Artes. Not a bad finish to the day, in which we went tragically over budget for the first time.
With a good dinner inside of me, and a good night's rest (on cardboard pillows, damn you Cordoba Backpackers), everything should be happier. Can't wait for Salta!
I miss Bs. As. already
Our bus ticket ended up being not one, not two, but THREE TIMES more expensive than either guidebook predicted, and I have a sinking feeling that all subsequent trips are going to be similar. I refuse to believe that the price of gas and travel has gone up that much in the past six months, and maintain that we are beings screwed in some way that remains unexplained.
Riding high in the second story of our Bus-Cama, we left Buenos Aires after the sun set and drove on into the night. Sleep was fitful, as can be expected, so the glowing sunrise woke us up somewhere in the countryside. The entire skyline was aglow with oranges and purples, but I just didn't have the energy to enjoy it.
A much less cheery taxi driver drove us to our hostel at 7:00 am this morning, supposedly dumping us off a block away. Try 5. Then, the room that we had reserved over a week in advance, and had received not one, not two, not three, but FOUR irrelevant follow-up confirmation emails was not there. Instead, we were given a room with a "private bathroom" read: strange partition with a 3.5 inch metal door which only opens from the outside. It's like showering in a safe, only it's meant to keep you in. I chose to douse the floor of our dormitory-style bedroom with water rather than be interred in a watery lock-box. Then, my shower ran out of cold water, scalding my tired body at 10:00 am when we finally were able to check into the hotel. Córdoba Backpackers Hostel is NOT on my list of favorite places right now.
The only minutely redeeming quality is the Wi-Fi connection...but it's only available in building #1, across the fucking street from our room! Ridiculous.
The city of Córdoba itself, much like its European counterpart, is a mixture of University town and old cathedrals. The Muslims and Catholics built the old one, but the Jesuits built the new one. It's a pretty city, smaller and a little less classy than the Capital Federal, but it grows on you.
In need of a pick-me-up after the disappointing morning, D and I hopped over to the mall for a little 007 action, just in time to catch the Argentinian premimer of Casino Royale. Loved the new Bond, loved the action, thought the styling was cheesy and trashy. What kind of Monte Carlo croupier would wear a satin vest embroidered with playing cards? We're not in Vegas here.
We followed our North American dose of pop with South American culture, visiting the small but interesting Regional Museum of Bellas Artes. Not a bad finish to the day, in which we went tragically over budget for the first time.
With a good dinner inside of me, and a good night's rest (on cardboard pillows, damn you Cordoba Backpackers), everything should be happier. Can't wait for Salta!
I miss Bs. As. already
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