Silviana Riqueros Blog: June 2008

Backpacking North Argentina Saturday 7th June 2008

So I leave the buzz of Buenos Aires and head north for the Iguazu waterfalls that lie on the border of three countries Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. A dinghy hostel but the falls are great, although the experience is a little too commercial for my liking. Rather than taking the little toy train into the nature reserve I walk along a path and meet a monkey munching away on a branch. I take a bus into Brazil for an hour but couldn't find a toilet so I return to Argentina. I visit the falls on a rainy morning.

I break up a long journey West by stopping off at a two-storey provincial town called Resistencia. I am gawped at by the locals. There are no hostels so I spend the night at a horribly expensive hotel/knocking shop where I hide under yucky covers – promise myself to buy a sleeping bag and watch far too many Warner comedies. The next day perks up and I visit the local museum of Cacho culture, where I am guided through artefacts of the spanish conquest and cute aboriginal mythological characters. followed by bizarre dreams on the coach to Salta.

Salta is a lovely little city at the base of Cera (hill) San Bernado. On a beautifully warm day I take a gondola up the hill and climb down the path where the stations of the cross have been destroyed by graffiti. The next day I take a bus out into the rain forest at San Lorenzo and walk up-hill mostly clambering up the bolders on the river and spend the evening trying to read accompanied by the dischordance of pumping music, the play-station, ping-pong and... like North American back-packer's that...like...overuse a particular word...like... when they're...like...explaining something...?!!!

San Salvador de Jujuy - the air is cleaner, the people browner with rounder faces and money smells of cheese! I am beginning to sound like a lonely planet guide, uufff.

A gentle night in the hostel in Tilcara, I have tucked myself in bed early while other dormies have gone down into the village to eat. The dusty dog has come in and now refuses to budge from the pot-belly stove I've kept stoked and fierce all night. A change of shift here, a slower pace, although the hostel still has a lot of traffic, and back packer's tend to be do-ers! it's a small village on the way to Bolivia, allegedly an artist's colony. It reminds me of the village in Northern Exposure, the comedy drama series set in Alaska. I have done a fair bit of walking since I've been here, visited a lagoon, some ruins and today the Devil's gorge, which is...a devil of a gorge really! I have eaten llama in several forms, it comes as a standard meat here and I read The Little Prince again. Awww

On to Bolivia on Saturday, a full day travelling – maybe a day and a night depending on where I stop, maybe a week given that protesters seem to be blocking roads everywhere. It seems that Eva Morales is not as popular as he once was. Feeling a bit pointless today to be honest.

Bolivia

After days of village hopping in the barren dusty district of Jujuj in Argentina, we arrive at the Bolivian border. And yes, all the women are wearing ten to fifteen skirts, dolly aprons and small bowler hats over long plaited hair, carrying large colourful sacks on their backs, containing babies or great bagfuls of saltenos, empanadas, chicken pieces and potato and maize patties. The trains are on strike until further notice and the roads are blocked with protests throughout the country so our only option is to go to Tupiza a small village set beneath rainbow coloured hills, mountains and canyons of the Cordillera de Chicas.

Famous for being the setting of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (rings a bell, but I don't remember the plot) the best thing about this place was the hotel – where for the price of a bed in a dorm in Argentina we could afford rooms with big comfy proper beds and tellies and hot, hot luxuriously hot showers! Beds! Tellies! Showers!

Many of the other backpackers I'd met on the trail in Jujuy were stranded here and the spirit of the place was cheerful but claustrophobic. Most people were going on to do three day excursions of the Atacama salt flats, featuring active volcanos, geezers (have I spelt that right?) a night in a hotel made of salt and visits to three lakes of different colours (something about algae!)

The best thing about these trips is being able to take photos with weird perspectives – because all you see for miles is white upon white upon white, the depth of field is distorted so you can take pictures of (say) an egg in the foreground and someone standing in the background and it looks like a mini person on a giant egg. If I didn't have an excursion allergy and a budget tighter than una cola de pata I might have produced...erm...what would I have taken...

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me lying across a fork like a human sausage

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me diving into the yoke of a dippie egg!

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me buttering toast with an ice hockey stick

Hmmm there seems to be an English Breakfast theme here...(Andy salivates!) ....and finally, much more relevant to my current existence rather than my culinerary fantasies....

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me drowning in an empanada!

My best day in Tupiza was an afternoon horse riding where we visited the Devil's Door (oooh!) The Place of Men (ooh!) [vaguely phallic rock structures] and the Inca's canyon (gasp!) [a very narrow canyon of a dried up river carved like a shard straight through a hill] – geologically fascinating if you know anything about geology. On the way back I decided I was going to volunteer as an English speaking guide and amused myself by making up mythological legends for every rock-face, every tree, every abandoned building we passed. When I sat down for breakfast the next morning with a start, reminded of my bum-bone-bruises I changed my mind, the news came through that the strikes were lifted & this cowboy took the first train out of there - an 18 hour journey to La Paz.

And so here I am fully clothed under my bed sheets in a hostal where you just don't want to touch anything, where the 24 hour hot water advertised all depends on turning the tap so low that you literally need to wait for one hot drop and then rub it all over you for warmth and sanitation. La Paz is traffic burdened and noisey, but built on slopes of cobbled stone streets and has a unique charm. I am living near the witches market, where you can buy all kinds of remedies and potions and probably a spell or two, who am I kidding, in La Paz they would sell you a finger nail cutting if they thought you'd buy it. The streets are crammed with the most wonderful wares, multi-coloured weaving, ethnic fabrics galore, more pan pipes than you might hear in...er...almost every Arndale shopping centre in the UK on a saturday morning...all of which I would love to buy – if my back-pack was indeed a tardis, rather than a....well... a simple back-pack. I did splash out on a rather dandy new pencil case however, and proudly filled it with my small stationary stock.

Here I have had my first experience of altitude sickness and I have felt decidedly giddy ever since I arrived – always glad to see other travellers wandering up and down the slopes walking as if they were on their way back from their own centegenous (?) celebrations with a bag of coins from HRH and a slice of cake wrapped in a napkin. There's something very comical about seeing people who wear walking boots and carry swiss army pen knives having difficulty standing up straight! I took afternoon refuge in a cafe & drank pints of cocoa leaf tea (the remedy for soroche) and plotted an escape to a beach in Ecuador where I might devote myself to dwelling in a hammock for a month of two.

Unfortunately, I can't afford the plane ticket but I have been seriously battling with myself with a desire to skip the whole Peruvian experience – which of course would be traveller's sacrilege. A day away from the mystical lost city of Machu Pichu and I am dreading it. When 'places of interest' are so epic they attract epic crowds of tourists and the prices reflect the general epic-ness! Machu Pichu receives a thousand visitors a day, consequently the mountain's slopes are slipping 1cm a month and scientists predict a catastrophic landslide. One day...

peru

So then I went to Lake Titicaca, spent one day in Copocabana on the Bolivian side, crossed over to Peru, visited Puno for a day and took the night bus to Cuzco, the oldest Inca city in Peru. In Puno I took a boat trip out to las Islas de Uros, which are man made islands of criss-crossed reeds – spongey to walk on and a fascinating little community of people who originally decided to build their own island to protect themselves from aggressive land dwellers.

I arrived in Cusco for the Inti Raymi celebrations – the fiesta del sol in spanish where everyone dressed up in Inca costumes and dances and parades around the main square for near enough four days. Cusco is beautifully warm in the day and visciously cold at night, so much so, that actually you just spend the whole day thawing. I have not been terribly well here unfortunately so no amount of sun god ephigies have cheered me up, but thankfully I am feeling much much better today and I am just about to spend ridiculous amounts of cash to go to Machu Pichu and other sites of the Sacred Valley, I believe tomorrow there's even a small shamanic ceremony thrown in! (What shall I wear?)

Andy Taylor

Silviana Riqueros Blog

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