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.
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