Al Norte

I have no pictures for this post. See the previous post to understand why.

Other than the fact that I was robbed of the camera and associated equipment I'd collected of the past year and a half, the short time I had to see the northern, less traveled land of Argentina was actually one of the most memorable trips I believe I'll ever make.

Maybe because I was traveling solo, maybe because it was my first time really going farther than most people ever go, or maybe it was because I saw people and places that marked a new record in cultural distance from the United States, but it certainly felt good to me.

My trip started with a 6 hour bus ride form Jesús María to Catamarca - a more or less good-for-nothing desert town without much to do. I spent my time there with some other friends from Córdoba and a few others unfortunate enough to live in the desert. We spent a day in the campground about 20 km outside of the city, but other than that, not much happened. After two nights I stocked up on wheat crackers, frosted cookies, muffins, bottled water, and toilet paper, and then headed up north for a quick look.

The first stop was Salta, one of Argentina's bigger cities situated in a sub-tropical rain forest basin. The city its self looked pretty picturesque - as if out of National Geographic magazine - thick green forest with 13 to 15 story white, dirty, and very boxy apartment buildings rising up among a massive spread of shanty houses topped with clay-shingled roofs, all punctuated by the occasional 18th century Spanish church. The whole color scheme - the dark thick green of the palm trees and bushes next to the houses all smeared with white and grey broken plaster next to the dark reddish brown of the roofs - is quite impressive when seen on such a massive scale, as few other colors actually existed in the general view of the city.

After taking the night time bus for 8 hours to avoid paying for a hostel that night, I set off walking around 8 in the morning for a hostel I had read about in my South America guide - a hostel which was significantly farther from the terminal than it appeared to be on the map. SO I spent the first hour of my morning carrying my backpack and camera bag about 5 km across the city’s center and central plaza to my hostel, where I checked in for 20 pesos a night (US$5!), then asked the 'desk clerk' (I don’t know if he even really had a job there of just hung out and played Playstation...) what all there was to see around that area. I set my sights for that day on a small town called San Lorenzo, situated up in the rain forest mountains that surround Salta.

After a 45 minute bus ride I'm there and really the only available activity seems to be walking in search of activities, so I found a dirt road that seemed to head straight for the higher mountains and took off walking. I passed there houses with horses, llamas, and chickens roaming freely around out front, but as I got higher there were less and less signs of men, and after about 2 hours I came to the end of the road at an unbelievably picturesque pasture cut in the rainforest where 25 or 30 llamas grazed around a tiny little white-plastered hut with cloths hung out to dry in front.  At that point I back-tracked a bit to a clearing in the forest where it seemed I could easily make progress up the mountain. Following trails that were made obviously by some kind of animal, I make it a good kilometer zig zagging back and forth up the side, but eventually got to a point where the forest got unbelievably thick, so I stopped, sat down, made myself a little fire, and, because it was more or less lunch time, opened up my wheat crackers and water. It was quite the place to sit for a good two hours, and from there I could see what looked like Jurassic park - things you think you see in photos but couldn't actually exist in real life - the foothills of the Andes mountains, every inch covered in dark green forest and some yellow-flowering tree, and not a trace of any human anything.

After that I made my way down the mountain, a process which went much like the paragraph above, but in reverse. I arrived in Salta with time to take a cable car up to the General Güemes monument which sat on a hill high above the city and housed a 6 meter 4 ton stone Jesus that was brought there in the mid 1800's. It seemed more like a Jesus monument to me, but I guess General Güemes liked Jesus, so he's probably ok with it. Back down in the city, I took time to take a look at the local artists, then went back to my hostel, at a meal of wheat crackers and water with a muffin for desert, and went to bed early, anticipating an early departure towards the north the next morning.

That day I committed a pretty clumsy logistical error, because what I thought would make a good day trip should have been much more, yet leaving my backpack in the gear closet of my hostel in Salta gave the obligation to make the 4 hour trip back that day. So, at 7 in the morning I caught little bus north to the town of Pulmamarca, a town which is revered as the beginning of the 'Bolivian' or the Indian part of Argentina. In that two hour ride, as we climbed steadily up the Andean Plateau, I saw the rainforest kind of dissolve and sink down into the mountains, revealing an almost tundra-like landscape with colored cliffs a thousand times more spectacular than the Grand Canyon. If it weren’t for the massive cactus, it would nearly have looked like Alaska in the summertime - Alaska mixed with the Grand Canyon...

Pulmamarca didn't have much to offer in the way of doing anything, but until then I had never seen anything like it. It was like an inhabited ghost town. The houses were made entirely of adobe bricks, plastered on the side with red mud that cracked off in huge chunks, with mud and straw roofs. People walked in the streets carrying massive loads of food or cloths wrapped in large colorful blankets, and the one market poured out onto the street with vendors selling all hand made blankets and sweaters and socks. After 30 minutes of walking and taking pictures through the tiny town, I made the 5 km walk north on the dirt 'highway' to where I as told there was the marker of the Tropic of Capricorn. I can't say it was really worth the hour long walk, because the marker was really just a rock with a picture of a horse, but at least I have the picture (hahaha). After that I flagged down the next bus headed north, and made my way another 2 hours north to the town of Humahuaca.

In Humahuaca, the major thing that set it apart from most Argentino towns is that Spanish is not the most widely spoken language on the streets, but rather Quecheua - the language of the Incan empire that has been spoken in South America since pre-Colombian times. Indeed, many of the people of the north carry unbroken Incan and other indigenous blood lines - direct ancestors of the largest pre-Colombian society. Of course, nearly all of them speak Spanish as well, so getting by in the own was no real problem. The people there struck me just as did the people of Pulmamarca - but to an even greater extend. They were so obviously for such a different world from the one that I grew up in, and you could see it in everything about them. All the corny ''I went to south America'' gear that they sell in airports and tourist shops in the big cities - ponchos, hats, boots, llama wool socks and sweaters and blankets of pink, green, yellow, blue, red, and black - the people in Humahuaca wore was I do a t-shirt and jeans. I stood out more than anyone ever could, and I felt it. I decided to treat myself to a meal, seeing as I couldn't really bring myself to miss a stab at whatever 'regional specialty' there may be. It was llama - some odd sort of brown llama meat stew with potatoes and large pieces of chocro that tasted pretty much like corn starch. It wasn't bad - in fact it was actually what I imagined that 'Indian' food would be like.

There is where came into play my major logistical error: my next destination, La Quiaca was just 250 km to the north, yet for some reason I had thought it a better idea to make Humahuaca a day trip and leave my gear in the hostel. So I went back to Salta, stopping in another small town, Tilcara, on the way.

At the hostel, though I wasn't paying for another night, I stayed around to talk with the other backpackers and to hear their stories. I guess every night is the same in a place like that - as new people come in and old ones head out, all with a mountain of stories to tell, there's just no other option. I sat and listened as young people, mostly from the States and Europe, told the stories of where they've been, what they've seen, where they're going, and where they hope to some day be. I realized then that what really makes the backpacking lifestyle addicting are the stories that one hears along the way. You realize that no matter where you've been or what you've seen there are a hundred thousand places and things out there that you haven't, and that the type of person so discard everything but what goes in a backpack and head out for years at a time is the type of the person who saw the side of things that, when told, makes it seem more fascinating than you ever would have imagined before. I really could notice a strong connect between total strangers in that hostel that comes from the recognition that they are all amongst very few people who understand each other, and that they all see things in a slightly different way that the people they all came from.

I met two Germans who had bee on the road for three years, making a hitch hiking tour of the United States over the course of one, Europe and North Africa over another, and had spent the last making their way from Central America down to the southern tip of the Americas. The others had pretty much different versions of the same story; stories of why they left and where they've been.

Talking to two Israelis who were then traveling together after having met in southern Argentina, parted, then met up again in the north, I told them that I didn't really have a plan for what I was doing. So, he told me, ''Then you will come with us to Bolivia,'' but I explained that I couldn’t actually enter Bolivia, though I was willing to go as far as La Quiaca, a town right on the border. But, when I went to the terminal, their buss, the midnight bus to La Quiaca, was full, so I played a guy to drive me to Jujuy, about 2 hours north, where I was told I could catch a bus at any hour to La Quiaca, and I did.

After getting to La Quiaca at 5:30 in the morning, I didn't have much time to do anything as I spent most of my time getting robbed. I was the victim of a scam that, according to the police, happens almost daily; a man claiming to be police accuses me and the random guy walking next to me of being seen leaving a building with two women just caught with US$4000 and an entire backpack of cocaine. He asks for my ID, and then looks through my wallet and that of the guy next to me, in which he finds 500 American dollars. Accusing us of working together and demands an explanation for why we are carrying so much money, and when I say I'm not with him he tells me to drop my stuff he's going to search it all. Once he comes up with the camera, he leads me through a series of exercises, like having me turn around while he pats me down, having me untie my shoes and take off m socks, and shining a light in my eyes to see if I'm drugged, all so that the other can move my camera from my bag to his and replace it with rocks. Then he tells me that I'm ok, that he's putting everything in my backpack and he doesn't ever want to see me again. The other guy, however, has to stay because he has far too much cash to be beyond suspicion. I go around the nearest corner, look through my stuff, find rocks where the camera was, run back to where I was searched, and no one is there. That was that.

The police were helpful, but there was nothing they could do and I knew that. The camera is likely being sold on the street in Bolivia.

That event in its self was heartbreaking enough that I turned around and headed home. After one night (night being 6 in the morning to 2 in the after noon) in a hostel at La Quiaca, where I found it difficult to sleep, waking up frequently gasping for air (La Quiaca is at 4500  meters, higher than the tallest mountain in the continental US), I caught a bus south to Villa Grl. Güemes, and on the way updated my previous record, set 1 day back, for most beautiful landscape ever witnessed (as well as breaking my lifetime not-in-an-airplane altitude record). At 15000 feet the Andean Plateau is beyond words, and now on my 'To See Before Death' list for everyone I know.

From Güemes, I caught a direct bus to Jesús María, which included running out of gas once on the side of the road, and having to switch buses once because our broke, then switching to a bus full of flies, but that's all pretty typical Argentine life.