It was cold at night and cool in the mornings in Humahuaca. I needed something to warm me up and discovered that an item I’d seen on many menus, a submarino, was hot chocolate. Much to my horror what arrived at my table appeared to be a cup of boiling milk. Aah, but in the hot milk is a chunk of solid chocolate which melts rapidly and within minutes the drink is ready. A local dish to add to picante de pollo, locro and llama stew (which I couldn’t bear to eat).
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Hotel nights
I found a place to eat that suited me and went most nights. It was the restaurant of a large hotel, a cavernous space with ugly strip lighting and a freezer in the corner that hummed and rattled like a tractor. I was the only client and my company the ubiquitous television but the mournful woman who worked there served me up a range of delicious food – picante de pollo, spicy chicken served over the local yellow potatoes, kid stew, locro – and glasses of rough red wine for 40p.
Way to Iruja
I suppose you've been to Iruja? asked the owner of my hotel, a sweet Bolivian-looking-but actually-Argentine woman called Elsa who spent her whole time sweeping and mopping her little place. No I replied. What is there in Iruja? Es un pueblito. It’s a little town. Though not in the province of Jujuy, she added but Salta which seemed to make it less worthy. Nice? I asked. Hmmmm she said. I wasn’t sure why I should go to Iruja – Elsa was far from convincing - but a bus went daily and so I set off.
It became clear as we piled onto the bus that going to Iruja was the thing to do. Aside from a handful of bored locals who fell asleep promptly there were several excited Argentine tourists and a man at the front with his camera primed.
Twenty minutes into the journey the bus veered suddenly off the paved main road and ploughed straight across the cacti fields. We rounded a corner and everything changed.
Towering grey hills hung ominously in the distance, their soft edges rubbed out and all the bleakness of the flat dusty landscape gone as the track wound and wound back round the hills, down and up and down again. Bright green patches of maize and mud houses dotted the distant valley floor. At 4000 metres the bus stopped so we could admire the view - and fail to breathe in the thin air. As we neared Iruja the hills became higher and harder, sculptured like the pipes of an organ. We entered a narrow canyon and crossed several rivers, the bottom of the bus scraping and scratching against the rocks.
Iruja clings perilously to one side of a deep gorge – I was amazed that the village existed at all. The way we’d come was the only way in to arrive and depart and from every street the rocks of the canyon rose up like prison walls. In the rainy season – summer – when the rivers rise reaching Iruja is a long hard mission. On the walls of our bus a fierce notice stated that during the summer months tickets would not be sold in advance, customers were advised to wear boots and waterproof coats and bring with them food and water.
On a high narrow street I found a sweet little cafe with bright plastic tablecloths and an old Mexican film on the tv, for beer and empanadas. The owner’s small daughter ran in from the street and without warning, came up to me and pinched my nose, hard. She was dragged away and we all heard her appalled mother shouting at her in the kitchen. It seemed fitting, somehow, that odd, unexpected things happen in Iruja, so far from anywhere.
I visited the wonky yellow church whose modesty belied a gleaming gold altarpiece in its whitewashed interior and the rare paintings of armed archangels, made by indigenous artists in Cusco. Famously the angels are dressed in sixteenth Spanish soldier outfits with long frock coats and muskets. The dark glossy backgrounds and heavy decorative roses of the pictures recalled another age. And then I jumped on the bus for the long road back – we left late because the bus driver and his boy, covered in oil, were underneath the vehicle, fixing its ancient engine. The fear of being stranded in strange Iruja, high in the freezing mountain air, shone from their sweating faces. We creaked away and whenever we stopped to let a passenger off the driver leapt from his seat and banged something hopefully with a large spanner but we made it back, everyone of us willing the battered old bus on, to Humahuaca.
Nothing could have prepared me for the beauty of the journey and the compelling isolation of the mountain village. In Iruja condors circle the sky.
It became clear as we piled onto the bus that going to Iruja was the thing to do. Aside from a handful of bored locals who fell asleep promptly there were several excited Argentine tourists and a man at the front with his camera primed.
Twenty minutes into the journey the bus veered suddenly off the paved main road and ploughed straight across the cacti fields. We rounded a corner and everything changed.
Towering grey hills hung ominously in the distance, their soft edges rubbed out and all the bleakness of the flat dusty landscape gone as the track wound and wound back round the hills, down and up and down again. Bright green patches of maize and mud houses dotted the distant valley floor. At 4000 metres the bus stopped so we could admire the view - and fail to breathe in the thin air. As we neared Iruja the hills became higher and harder, sculptured like the pipes of an organ. We entered a narrow canyon and crossed several rivers, the bottom of the bus scraping and scratching against the rocks.
Iruja clings perilously to one side of a deep gorge – I was amazed that the village existed at all. The way we’d come was the only way in to arrive and depart and from every street the rocks of the canyon rose up like prison walls. In the rainy season – summer – when the rivers rise reaching Iruja is a long hard mission. On the walls of our bus a fierce notice stated that during the summer months tickets would not be sold in advance, customers were advised to wear boots and waterproof coats and bring with them food and water.
On a high narrow street I found a sweet little cafe with bright plastic tablecloths and an old Mexican film on the tv, for beer and empanadas. The owner’s small daughter ran in from the street and without warning, came up to me and pinched my nose, hard. She was dragged away and we all heard her appalled mother shouting at her in the kitchen. It seemed fitting, somehow, that odd, unexpected things happen in Iruja, so far from anywhere.
I visited the wonky yellow church whose modesty belied a gleaming gold altarpiece in its whitewashed interior and the rare paintings of armed archangels, made by indigenous artists in Cusco. Famously the angels are dressed in sixteenth Spanish soldier outfits with long frock coats and muskets. The dark glossy backgrounds and heavy decorative roses of the pictures recalled another age. And then I jumped on the bus for the long road back – we left late because the bus driver and his boy, covered in oil, were underneath the vehicle, fixing its ancient engine. The fear of being stranded in strange Iruja, high in the freezing mountain air, shone from their sweating faces. We creaked away and whenever we stopped to let a passenger off the driver leapt from his seat and banged something hopefully with a large spanner but we made it back, everyone of us willing the battered old bus on, to Humahuaca.
Nothing could have prepared me for the beauty of the journey and the compelling isolation of the mountain village. In Iruja condors circle the sky.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Cacti and Coctaca
So I went. The local bus was a covert operation – it didn’t go from the bus station – which meant me lurking early in the morning with a shifty crowd by the tree on the old railway track. I watched as the market sellers, often old ladies with an unimaginable strength, arrived in a variety of vehicles – lorries, beaten-up trucks, taxis, trolleys, carts – to lay out their wares under ragged tarpaulins while the rising sun turned the hills around Humahuaca deep red. There was the empanada woman who hauled a huge basket of warm home-made pasties, wrapped in numerous cloths to keep them hot, and the locro seller who had a large cauldron on the ground and was surrounded by standing men hungrily slurping the stew from bowls. No-one has a cafe con leche with medialunas (croissants) for breakfast in these parts. Both women were gone, baskets and pots bundled away, before 9am.
The bus dropped me in Coctaca, in a large space in front of the school. There was nothing else around, no people, no houses, no streets, nothing – just flat dusty plains to the horizon, covered in cacti. I was slightly alarmed. It was very very hot, there was little shade and the bus driver told me that he’d be back in 5 hours or so. I headed off down a track – I’d gathered that the reason for visiting Coctaca was to see the ruinas but wasn’t sure what they were ruins of? And where? – and collared the first man I spotted scurrying across the vast emptiness who set me on my way. High above the school was a small settlement – mud houses with dirt floors and scratchy ground, a little church and a one-shelfed shop in someone’s front room – and piles of stones shaped into corales. For animals? Houses? There were no signs to say and on-one to ask. These were the ruins of Coctaca and frankly, they looked as though they’d been made yesterday. But the cacti I loved – huge and fat, they seemed to be sticking a finger to the sky.
The bus dropped me in Coctaca, in a large space in front of the school. There was nothing else around, no people, no houses, no streets, nothing – just flat dusty plains to the horizon, covered in cacti. I was slightly alarmed. It was very very hot, there was little shade and the bus driver told me that he’d be back in 5 hours or so. I headed off down a track – I’d gathered that the reason for visiting Coctaca was to see the ruinas but wasn’t sure what they were ruins of? And where? – and collared the first man I spotted scurrying across the vast emptiness who set me on my way. High above the school was a small settlement – mud houses with dirt floors and scratchy ground, a little church and a one-shelfed shop in someone’s front room – and piles of stones shaped into corales. For animals? Houses? There were no signs to say and on-one to ask. These were the ruins of Coctaca and frankly, they looked as though they’d been made yesterday. But the cacti I loved – huge and fat, they seemed to be sticking a finger to the sky.
I walked back to Humahuaca, in the searing heat, with the long dusty road home taunting me all the way. It took two hours and not a car nor a truck nor a bike passed by. I wondered whether the road would ever end as I rounded each corner alone and whether I’d be found, covered in dust and dying of thirst, weeks later. Instead I made the journey back with ease, in time for cold beer and lunch.
Do it yourself tours
I went to the small tour company in town whose flyers were everywhere, to see what trips they did. The woman at the desk barely looked away from her computer as I ran through the list – NO not that one. And no we’re not doing that one either. Possibly something tomorrow. That’s another similarity Humahuaca has with Bolivia, the bolshiness of the service industry. I was thousands of kilometres from Patagonia in every sense. Can’t be bothered said her body language and nor could I.
I decided to take myself on tour instead. I’d met a friendly man at a small lunch joint who sulked for a little when I told him I was English (the Falklands) but otherwise we chatted away. Pasiendo? (passing through) he asked. Yes I replied. Have you been to Coctaca? he asked.
I decided to take myself on tour instead. I’d met a friendly man at a small lunch joint who sulked for a little when I told him I was English (the Falklands) but otherwise we chatted away. Pasiendo? (passing through) he asked. Yes I replied. Have you been to Coctaca? he asked.
Coffee
It was impossible to get a decent cup of coffee in town. None of the little food joints opened in the mornings and anyway, they didn’t do coffee. It’s not drunk by the locals – just like Bolivia! – who start their day instead with horrible hot milky drinks or coca tea. The posh place did have an Italian coffee machine but the staff had no idea how to use it.
I eventually wandered down to the bus station in desperation. There, under a shady tree, was a large woman with pink stained cheeks and lips – she looked like an eccentric tramp. But far from it – she was in charge of her own hot drinks business. It was a highly effective operation. From one of several large sacks which concealed urns swaddled in eiderdown she poured out hot water and hot milk into a cup with several spoons of instant coffee. She also had a range of teas and powdered chocolate, chunks of sweet bread and several little stools for customers. By nine o’clock every morning she was packing up, a fat wad of notes tucked into her waistband. Brilliant.
I eventually wandered down to the bus station in desperation. There, under a shady tree, was a large woman with pink stained cheeks and lips – she looked like an eccentric tramp. But far from it – she was in charge of her own hot drinks business. It was a highly effective operation. From one of several large sacks which concealed urns swaddled in eiderdown she poured out hot water and hot milk into a cup with several spoons of instant coffee. She also had a range of teas and powdered chocolate, chunks of sweet bread and several little stools for customers. By nine o’clock every morning she was packing up, a fat wad of notes tucked into her waistband. Brilliant.
HIgh up!
I suffered from altitude sickness for the first few days in Humahuaca – the town is 3000 metres above sea level – and felt nauseous and headachy. I passed the time examining the array of woolly goods, stroking the furry llama socks, comparing hat shapes, getting an idea of prices. I wondered if the stuff had come from Bolivia but was assured it came from the Puna, the Argentine highlands – it seemed so similar. I noticed that none of the locals wore llama products – they kept warm at night and in the early mornings with polartec gloves, garish fleece jackets and lined anoraks.
Locro
The town seemed divided into two distinct parts. One was for the locals – the covered market place, the outdoors market straggling along long abandoned railway track, the little food places, concrete boxes or vast strip-lit dining halls, which were crammed at lunchtime. The other was for tourists – rows of shops selling piles of llama socks, hats, blankets, ponchos and rugs, musical instruments – pan pipes and toe nail shakers - and ugly ceramics as well as several restaurants with attractive lighting and stripy woven tablecloths, indigenous music on the stereo and wood-burning stoves smoking away. I was the only gringa in town and I spent my first night alone in a posh tourist joint, eating delicious locro – a local dish, stew made from large white corn kernels, chorizo, meat and squash – and a proper salad. A hippy couple wandered in, long hair, long clothes and guitars and began to sing ethereal wailing folk music – nature was mentioned a lot along with the sun, moon and stars. I was at least grateful for the warmth of the room and the salad and the orange glowing light and the escape from my little cell.
Virtually Bolivia
If I thought Jujuy was a different kind of Argentina, Humahuaca was a different country altogether. Everything about it reminded me of Bolivia – the dark skinned women with long black plaited hair, wide hats and pleated skirts; the tiny dark shops with goods piled up in sacks; the thin air and the bright blue sky; the little market and the mud houses; the strange video gaming places full of boys shooting the enemy or racing cars; the basic beer joints for men only lined along the old railway track.. I spent my first days asking everyone where they came from (not popular) – I couldn’t believe that the locals weren’t Bolivian. How could they be the same nation as the sleek sexy Portenos or the hairy Eskimo Fueguinos or the cowboys of Cordoba? Even my hotel was just like a place I stayed in on the shores of Lake Titicaca almost twenty years ago. It had basic rooms on two floors round a courtyard which was taken up by a large battered station wagon. Mine had a single bed squeezed against the wall, a little table covered in a plastic tablecloth with pink checks and yellow flowers – again! Bolivian! - and a bare light bulb dangling from the low ceiling but it was immaculately clean and very cheap. I was the only guest and though I wandered round the town and peered into half a dozen more hotels, mine was the one I liked the best.
Humahuaca
I was sitting outside one of my favourite local restaurants in Buenos Aires one balmy evening when I noticed the name of the street it was on – Humahuaca. Pronounced umawhacka, I loved the sound of it. It’s a place, I discovered and I decided, in that moment, that I was going to go there.
We left the chaos of downtown Jujuy (another great name, pronounced hoohooey), snaked quickly through the dense green hills surrounding the city and started to climb high into the mountains. The landscape changed dramatically – on both sides of the road rose high walls of barren rock striped pink, purple, red, yellow, fringed by plains of bulbous thorny cacti. Below ran the Rio Grande, almost dry after the end of summer rains but still marked by a winding green ribbon of willow trees and tall cedars along its banks.
The tin bus churned and strained as we rose higher and higher. Finally it limped into Humahuaca which gives its name to the small market town we arrived in and also the dramatic gorge we’d just driven along – La Quebrada de Humahuaca. La Quebrada de Humahuaca de Jujuy. Of such names adventures and legends are made.
We left the chaos of downtown Jujuy (another great name, pronounced hoohooey), snaked quickly through the dense green hills surrounding the city and started to climb high into the mountains. The landscape changed dramatically – on both sides of the road rose high walls of barren rock striped pink, purple, red, yellow, fringed by plains of bulbous thorny cacti. Below ran the Rio Grande, almost dry after the end of summer rains but still marked by a winding green ribbon of willow trees and tall cedars along its banks.
The tin bus churned and strained as we rose higher and higher. Finally it limped into Humahuaca which gives its name to the small market town we arrived in and also the dramatic gorge we’d just driven along – La Quebrada de Humahuaca. La Quebrada de Humahuaca de Jujuy. Of such names adventures and legends are made.
Poli Bol
I struggled through the mass of people and wares to the centre of town. I had a large awkward parcel that I wanted to send home. In one small corner of the central post office there was a little squared-off room: the customs department, which consisted of one man, a large table and a set of scales. My package was inspected and then weighed, rolled in bubble wrap (trade name Poli Bol) and brown parcel paper which I had to run out and buy and finally stamped all over with an official seal. While I was doing all this, the customs man, Fernando and I discussed my travel plans and, in his careful clear hand-writing he wrote down the names of several places I ought to visit and recited a local legend about a battle between an eagle and a jaguar. The jaguar won.
Whack! It all comes back
I arrived in San Salvador de Jujuy early in the morning. It felt like the world had turned backwards. Everything seemed entirely different – the bus station was a chaotic mess with ramshackle stalls selling tat and grubby eating joints, vendors carrying baskets of snacks and yelling out their wares. Gone, in a snap, was the cool order of Argentina; this was South America. The coffee was instant, the snacks were tamales (cornmeal dumplings), the tourist office was manned by two blowsy women who flicked idly through gossipy magazines and barely raised an eyebrow to help. The streets were packed with an overspilling market and blaring radios competed with each other. On the pavement at a busy junction a man, surrounded by punters had laid out vivid pictures of a hideous disease and was peddling some kind of potion that cured it. It was desperately hot and humid.
Goodbye to the Castros and to Jesus Maria
I took Dona Maria a small plant. She showed me her spare room and the newly decorated bathroom – just done she said and here’s the bedroom, ready if you come back to Jesus Maria. The whole family lined up on the pavement to say goodbye. Maria’s eyes filled with tears. I’d only known the Castros for a few days but felt a strange searing wrench leaving them all.
It was easy to like sleepy Jesus Maria with its quiet wide streets and little parks, surrounded by fields of soya and soaring Jesuit churches. The weather was fantastic, hot and sunny with barely a cloud to stain the blue sky. Semi-tropical with a distinct dry season as Maxi told me. (It was Maxi who said, in his serious fashion, when I was expanding one night about how delicious Argentine wine was – I’ve never had a bad glass, yum yum etc etc – yes there is bad wine here, Polly, have you tried Vino Toro? I did, it comes in cartons. Not good). But, after a wonderfully somnolent week, all the kinks of Buenos Aires flattened out, I kissed Patricia goodbye and climbed aboard the night bus. Time to head north.
It was easy to like sleepy Jesus Maria with its quiet wide streets and little parks, surrounded by fields of soya and soaring Jesuit churches. The weather was fantastic, hot and sunny with barely a cloud to stain the blue sky. Semi-tropical with a distinct dry season as Maxi told me. (It was Maxi who said, in his serious fashion, when I was expanding one night about how delicious Argentine wine was – I’ve never had a bad glass, yum yum etc etc – yes there is bad wine here, Polly, have you tried Vino Toro? I did, it comes in cartons. Not good). But, after a wonderfully somnolent week, all the kinks of Buenos Aires flattened out, I kissed Patricia goodbye and climbed aboard the night bus. Time to head north.
But what do you know of Jesus Maria?
Said Freddy, one of the friends. He was not impressed that I’d spent my days in the echoing ugliness of Diversia and nights insulting men with Patricia and packed me off to the local museum, on the other side of the river, in a district of the town which was once an Italian colony.
It was an old Jesuit mission – a lovely seventeenth century building with a grassy courtyard and large church. I’d learned already that the Camino Real - an old Inca highway which ran from Buenos Aires to the silver empire of Potosi in the high Andes of Bolivia – ran through Jesus Maria. I learned also that the Jesuits ‘evangelized the aborigines, built big buildings and churches, set up workshops, factories, bodegas and mills, worked the fields and cultivated vines and orchards, built canals, worked with stone and bronze, introduced a printing press, founded libraries, colleges and universities, published books and taught music, art, science and religious studies’. In Jesus Maria they funded all this by making decent wine, Lagrimillas de Oro (Little tears of Gold/Will be Sold/So while men sin/Our work can begin) the first to be served at the table of the King of Spain. There’s something very romantic about the Jesuits – principally they seem to have chosen the most beautiful places to build their missions – hills and rivers and lush green pastures. But also, because they were so successful in their endeavours and refused to give their income to the kingdom of Spain and kept it instead for their churches and their cause, they were eventually cast out by the jealous Spaniards, their valuable patronage cut off and the communities abandoned to the creeping vines and the jungle.
I went to another, more spectacular Jesuit mission. The gorgeous church – simple and white on the outside, a gold Baroque altarpiece within - had been restored and has several interesting features – an underground tunnel (the story goes that there were underground tunnels stretching all the way to Cordoba for clandestine movements) and an articulated wooden Christ on the Cross – arms stretched out when he was being crucified, by his sides when he wasn’t. These crude sculptures were used to teach the indigenous population Christianity. There was another rustic Jesus figure with strange swollen legs - because his form had been made by a native, modelled on another with a swollen leg problem. The paintings on the church walls depicted biblical scenes with seventeenth century colonial Spanish details and were made by masters in Cusco, the seat of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru. Interesting but I was more fascinated with the tiny modern-day town around the mission which had its own miniscule post office, police station and toothless ragged hag in situ. But no houses and scarcely a man or woman in sight.
It was an old Jesuit mission – a lovely seventeenth century building with a grassy courtyard and large church. I’d learned already that the Camino Real - an old Inca highway which ran from Buenos Aires to the silver empire of Potosi in the high Andes of Bolivia – ran through Jesus Maria. I learned also that the Jesuits ‘evangelized the aborigines, built big buildings and churches, set up workshops, factories, bodegas and mills, worked the fields and cultivated vines and orchards, built canals, worked with stone and bronze, introduced a printing press, founded libraries, colleges and universities, published books and taught music, art, science and religious studies’. In Jesus Maria they funded all this by making decent wine, Lagrimillas de Oro (Little tears of Gold/Will be Sold/So while men sin/Our work can begin) the first to be served at the table of the King of Spain. There’s something very romantic about the Jesuits – principally they seem to have chosen the most beautiful places to build their missions – hills and rivers and lush green pastures. But also, because they were so successful in their endeavours and refused to give their income to the kingdom of Spain and kept it instead for their churches and their cause, they were eventually cast out by the jealous Spaniards, their valuable patronage cut off and the communities abandoned to the creeping vines and the jungle.
I went to another, more spectacular Jesuit mission. The gorgeous church – simple and white on the outside, a gold Baroque altarpiece within - had been restored and has several interesting features – an underground tunnel (the story goes that there were underground tunnels stretching all the way to Cordoba for clandestine movements) and an articulated wooden Christ on the Cross – arms stretched out when he was being crucified, by his sides when he wasn’t. These crude sculptures were used to teach the indigenous population Christianity. There was another rustic Jesus figure with strange swollen legs - because his form had been made by a native, modelled on another with a swollen leg problem. The paintings on the church walls depicted biblical scenes with seventeenth century colonial Spanish details and were made by masters in Cusco, the seat of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru. Interesting but I was more fascinated with the tiny modern-day town around the mission which had its own miniscule post office, police station and toothless ragged hag in situ. But no houses and scarcely a man or woman in sight.
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