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.
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