American Perkinses from Beyond Machu Picchu...

We found a casita (little house) for rent in Cusco, Perú, on Craigslist. Cusco is the nearest major city to the ruins at Machu Picchu, and is an interesting place in its own right because of its former status as the southern capital of the Inca empire. The casita we rented is in a neighbourhood called San Sebastián, which is much more interesting and real than downtown Cusco, although it lacks the perfect Inca stonework. The property is walled in, has a main house containing an American expat family, a big garden with blooming flowers of all kinds, and many resident hummingbirds and accompanying flummoxed cats.

We were met at the bus station by Angela, the 17-year-old daughter of the family, who took us back to the pad in a taxi, where we met Gabriel, 14 year-old son, and Michael, father of indeterminate age. We were met warmly in the kitchen/band hall, and had a nice time getting to know each other while making dinner. They are a great bunch of people; extremely laid back, totally open, and very interesting. They lead a very high-texture life in Cusco; they have many friends and live life one day at a time.

The kitchen is the main hang out in the house. It is very well lived in. There are stacks of MP3s on CD everywhere with ambiguous titles; you never know what you’re going to get, and when you get it (say, Stones), then there’s no guarantee that what you’ll get next will be at all similar (Bach organ fugues). We love hanging out at the house because of its warm feel, and all of the nice people coming and going.

Michael is a really interesting dude. He wears his grey hair long under an abused leather hat. He uses the expression “out of sight” in all the right ways. He’s a great guy to talk to about how crazy the USA is/was/will be, but he’s not bitter about it particularly. As I said, he knows how to take it one day at a time. A true prince of a man, and a guy we will keep in touch with.

The living situation has been kind of Perkinsian, for those of you who know of, or know personally, the famous Salt Spring Perkinses… but different; more fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pantsing. Life is lived on the edge… of what, I’m not exactly sure, but we’re happy to be involved.

Machu Picchu was discovered by Jen and Neil in 2007. Well… pretty much. It was discovered by Hiram Bingham, an American Yale graduate who is famous for not realizing how incredibly lucky he was, in 1911. Well, there were farmers up there tending their flocks and hanging out, but they didn’t qualify as “Western Scientists”. At first Bingham thought that this was a famous undiscovered last holdout of the Incans that had been written about by the Spanish, but which had been lost some time between the mid sixteenth century and the early twentieth. He found it, but wasn’t totally convinced that it was an important place, and pretty much left it to be thoroughly explored some years later.

When Bingham first came across the site it was buried in jungly forest. Machu Picchu is located on the “eyebrow of the jungle”, or junga, according to local experts, and was a ceremonial city and getaway for royalty during the height of the Incan empire… maybe. Experts still aren’t really sure. The fact that it was buried in jungle cover, and hence could not be appreciated in a single overall view, probably had a lot to do with Bingham’s underestimation of the importance of the site.

To get to Machu Picchu we took a train with a glass roof from Ollantaytambo, another very interesting Inca city with expansive ruins, to the town nearest the ruins called Aguas Calientes. It is named for the stinky swill that spews out of the ground nearby that the locals put in baths and charge tourists to decompose in. We didn’t go to the baths. There are better ones in Canada… in my bathroom. There were some really nice bathing suits for rent in town though. We were tempted to rent them just to cruise around town in… flattering floral numbers with integrated frilly skirts.

The town is another hastily constructed tourist pit, but it has a really nice, dirty, crazy feel to it. The streets are narrow and there is basically no car traffic. One is constantly being assaulted by restaurateurs and bathing suit rental artists. The streets are steep, and the competition for tourist bucks is fierce, so strolling through town is not exactly the peak of relaxation, but we found it pretty amusing.

We had a cheap dinner, went to bed, and woke up the next morning at about 5AM - we wanted to Machu as much Picchu as possible. We jumped on the bus and were at the gates by about 6:30AM. We paid the very high admission price and slipped through the zigzagging tunnel into the ruins. Stepping out from behind the last wall and seeing the ruins stretched out in the morning light was something I’ll always remember. Photos don’t really do it justice; they all end up looking fake. Believe you me, that place is real.

When one sees Machu Picchu today, there is absolultely no doubt about how important to its people and how grand it must have been during its peak of inhabitation. It is a beautifully conceived and constructed city sitting between two serene peaks, surrounded by sheer valleys and snow-capped ranges in the distance. It is the most incredible place that I have ever been.

We watched the sunrise (with the other 600 people who wanted to maximize their Picchu), and began a long day of exploring the ins and outs of the site. One of the highlights was climbing the very pointy peak at the far end of the ruins called Wayna Picchu. Stairs trace the side of the mountain up to buildings on its very peak. A band of bare-chested 21-year-old male tourists had assembled on the tippy tip top - they were busy comparing nipples and stupidity when we showed up, so we didn’t get a chance to meditate there. We looked around for a minute and went on our way.


From there we walked down the back of the peak to the erroneously named Temple of the Moon. Wooooo. It was named by some gatekeeper in the ‘70s, and is actually a horrible place to observe the moon, but it was an interesting anyway; a cave with integrated Incan stonework and many niches. Niches are all over Incan structures, and were used for keeping sacred artifacts, bad people, virgins, food, soft drinks, and electric razors.

We spent a total of 4 hours on Wayna Picchu, from about 8AM to 12PM, so we still had a full half-day ahead of us in the main ruins. We spent the rest of the time reviewing the nooks and crannies, and at about 4:30PM we began the walk back to Aguas Calientes which took about an hour and a half total. I think that was probably the most walking mileage I’ve ever put on in a day.

We woke up the next morning and got back on the train (where we were assaulted through dance by a terrifying steward in a white woolen mask - we still don´t know what the hell happened there, but we were scared), then a combi, then a bus, saw more ruins at Pisac, then another combi, then we were back home. This was the end of a major event for us. We had been looking forward to Machuing a bit of Picchu since before leaving Canada, so it was an incredible relief to have it done with, and it was especially satisfying because it more than lived up to the almost impossible hype.

The next week in Cusco was spent mostly being homebodies, enjoying our pad and getting work done. The next weekend we set out on another mission to see Inca ruins, but the main purpose of this hike, from Cusco to the Sacred Valley over the highlands in between, was to see more of the incredible land around Cusco. The ruins were an added bonus.

We started at a site called Sacsaywaman, conveniently similar in sound to “Sexy Woman”. The stones there at Saucymama are the largest available; the biggest are about 8m tall, and still have the exquisitely perfect joints that walls with smaller stones have.

After finishing with the ruins, we used a guidebook, topo map and GPS to find the trailhead. That took about 2 hours. There are many trails around there - it’s hard to know which ones are Incan. But we found the right path eventually, and set out to conquer the first of the three mountain passes of the day at 4300 meters. But everything up there is pretty high. It was like walking from 4300m to 4000m to 4350m to 4100m. Up and down, but not very down. But we were still panting like pant salesmen from the lack of oxygen at those elevations.

We camped in what we thought may have been some pre-Incan ruins at the top of a valley, and were visited by and entire family of 8 while eating dinner. They said they were looking for their sheep, and asked if we had seen any. We hadn’t. Then the children asked for money, and we gave them buns and butter, and they wandered off into the night. We couldn’t decide whether they were truly looking for their sheep, or whether handouts from traveling gringos were common enough that it was actually worth their while to drag the whole brood out to visit camping tourists.

We have found this type of meeting with locals a bit challenging; we love talking to campesinos in our horrible Spanish, but so often, after the initial exchange of pleasantries, the little request for money or sweets comes out and sours what was shaping up to be a perfectly good conversation. If you answer them “no”, then they typically lose interest and drift away. I still think that this type of interaction is better than no interaction at all, but I do not think that the solution is to give them money and sweets. That would only serve to reinforce this flawed relationship between tourist and campesino. I agree with Peter Frost, who wrote our excellent Cusco guidebook, who thinks that giving a lump sum (of money, not sweets) to a reputable charity is the way to go.

The stars that night were beautiful, and the full moon came up right outside our tent door, so we sat and ate fig and apple crumble and watched the moon. It was bitterly cold that night, but we survived and awoke the next morning to a beautiful blue sky full of puffy whispy clouds.

We ran across many herds of sheep and llamas on the high plateau that day before descending through a lush narrow gorge leading down from the plateau into the Sacred Valley. The gorge was replete with interesting bird life - bright yellow finches, flycatchers, and swallows. At one point I thought I saw the green back of a parakeet as well. We skirted the valley wall on a very narrow path and found the ruins, but by this time we were basically ruined out, so we made a cup of coffee with our trusty sock filter, and then made our way down to the town of Lamay.

On our way back to Cusco we stopped off at the busy market in Pisac, and Jen got some little things (adult llamas) for some very special people (Stanley, Walter, Connor, Grace, and Quinton). I sat, had a beer, watched our bags, and read Roughing It by Mark Twain. If you like this blog, read that book. That dude is a comic genius, ahem… and his tale of traveling to Nevada from St. Louis before the Pacific Railroad was laid is the best travel writing I’ve ever come across.

Now we’re back in Cusco, mopping up the last days in our home away from home. The jungle beckons. We took our first anti-malarial today, and we feel great! The next two weeks will be spent counting macaws at Las Piedras Biodiversity Station, so we’ve been practicing our counting feverishly. I can make it to 8 now, thanks mostly to my science degree. Jen has vaulted past me and can now count to 14, but she’s using her witchy feminine voodoo which I consider cheating.

Titicaaaaaca...

The bus to Puno, Peru featured in-bus Bingo and plenty more desert. Puno is on the south shore of the very large, very high, somewhat salty Lago Titicaca, which straddles the Peru-Bolivia border. According to a local, Bolivia got the titi and Peru got the caca. The lake was made famous in the early ´70s by Jacques Cousteau, who claimed to be on a biological mission of discovery, but was in fact looking for a giant life-sized statue of a man made of solid gold at the bottom of the lake.

Cousteau did not find the gold statue, but he did find primordial frogs with wings and gills. I remember vividly seeing that discovery on TV when I was a kid… Jacques holding one of these frogs by its back legs and pointing out all of its weird features. I vaguely remember his estimate of the number of frogs in the lake, too, using his special Cousteau science: 10⁵ frogs/m³.

Puno is a fairly dirty, busy little town. The streets are dominated by big heavy pedal tricycles used to carry people, wood, stoves, dogs on top of fruit, metal, and entire extended families. They are by far the most widely used form of transport in the city.

Our time was pretty limited in Puno, so we signed up for a tour to the floating reed islands of Uros, and to an island that has been inhabited for 10,000 called Taquile. The floating islands were very neat. They lay down layers of opposingly oriented reeds on top of floating moss over an area of about 500 square meters to create a floating platform, and then farm fish in holes in the middle, and build huts on them. The people were evicted from the shore a few thousand years ago, and are still living on the lake, although recently they have gained a foothold on shore again.

One gets the feeling that their style of living has been frozen in its current state because of the tremendous appeal it has to tourists. Once the tourists leave the island they probably slip back into jeans and take the motorboat to shore to check their email. Someone actually mentioned that they do have internet on the floating islands, powered by solar panel, but without a satellite feed I find that a bit hard to believe.

We saw a little boy trying to pee off the edge of the floating island, but ended up spraying a nice reed boat instead. We later climbed in and took the reed boat across the canal. But pee is clean, right?

The next day we climbed on a bus to Copacabana, in Bolivia. This border crossing was very easy. They actually allow contraband and coca leaves to be brought through this border crossing. I’m not sure why exactly, but maybe they figure there is exactly as much contraband in one country as in the other, so it doesn’t matter if there’s an even exchange.

This was the only city we saw in Bolivia. It was very cheap, the people were very poor, and for the most part, people on the street we found a little less friendly that in Peru/Chile/Argentina, but this is based on very limited exposure.
We loaded up on food in the local market, and took a boat to Isla del Sol, which is an island that has been lived on for a very long time, and is the mythical birthplace of important Incan deities. The island is covered in terraces, and its shoreline is generally very sheer, so once off the boat all the tourists climb about 400 steps to the southern town to check into their hostels.

We decided to keep walking to the beaches on the north-west shore to camp, and within about 15 minutes of stepping off the boat we were completely gringo-free, exploring the maze of paths that have been developed over the millennia by local farmers and their animals.

This was a truly incredible experience. We didn’t need a map, we could just pick paths that looked about right, although a couple of times we ended up walking through people’s living rooms. More on that later.

On the way to the beaches we found a soccer event in full swing! The island was so hilly it was hard to believe they had a space flat enough for a pitch, but on top of a big hill there was a large enough plateau. A nice old man told us that there were 7 teams of 11 people that played every Sunday on this field. It was very fun to watch the island people hanging out, eating, listening to music… like Parc Jeanne-Mance softball without the alcohol… and softball.

We continued on our way and found the perfect beach for camping. A little girl offered us her nice grassy backyard to camp in, so we accepted (for 5 Bolivianos - 80 cents), and set up shop. We tried to cook spaghetti at 4000m which didn’t work at all. We ended up with a disgusting glob of muck… which we ate. But it was gross. The girl’s family ran a kiosko (little store) right next to us that had red wine! So we got lucky.

The sun went down and farmers herded their animals home along the beach, a stunning sunset over the lake behind them. That was very pretty.

The stars that night were unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It was extremely bright. The dust clouds in the milky way were very well-defined, and the north-south axis was as plain as day because the upside-down big dipper could be used to find north, and the southern cross to find south.

The next morning I woke up horribly sick, but managed to stagger back; Jen basically dragged me to the boat on the south shore. In spite of that, Isla del Sol was a big highlight. Pigs, cows, sheep, ass, long-cultivated land, very nice people, and the feeling of genuine adventure, walking around on the ancient paths.

We made our way back to Puno, then grabbed a tour bus to Cusco that made stops at points of interest along the way. We saw some interesting pre-Incan artifacts, the Incan city of Raqchi with its giant silos, and a really interesting colonial church built on Incan foundations. Incans were very good with big rocks, so many many colonial structures are built on Incan foundations.

We arrived in Cusco at around 6PM, and met the daughter of the family whose property we had arranged to rent. She brought us home to our new pad, yada yada yada… It’s actually a great story, but this is a good time to stop. Stay tuned for stories of Machu Picchu, as well as the lesser known but equally affecting Mucho Poochu.

Neil and Jen Muad’Dib

We had too many options for proceeding after Salta. We decided to cut through Chile on our way to Peru instead of heading directly north to Bolivia. Rumours about closed border crossings and protestors with shovels helped to tip the scales.

The trip to the Chilean border was very interesting. We drove straight up the side of a giant mountain/sand dune onto what’s called the altiplano of the Andes, which is a high plane between the range’s eastern and western extent, sitting at about 3800m above sea level.

Our destination in Chile was the town of San Pedro de Atacama, which is a tourist haven renowned for its crazy inflated pricing. It is situated north of salt plains, at the foot of giant volcanoes to the east. We got off the bus and trundled down the main drag looking for a place to stay. The dusty strip was lined with restaurants and tour companies, all installed in what were previously something totally different and unsuited to conversion to their current function. This meant a lot of hasty renovations using the wrong materials by guys who didn’t know how to use tools.

We stayed in a café/hostel run by a hilariously absent-minded guy with a lisp and a saw. The room was cheap and gross, but strangely cosy. There were a brother and sister cat that kept us company. We woke up covered in paint that had fallen from the ceiling during the night - like fresh-fallen snow – very picturesque.

We spent that day on rental bikes exploring the pre-Incan/Incan ruins north of the city. It was extremely hot and dry. This was the first taste of many tales of heroic resistance on the part of native South Americans to Spanish invaders. We struck out further north into what is called the Devil’s Throat, a gorge carved in the soft rock by a river that stopped flowing a long time ago. This was exciting mountain biking, especially sections where the hole you were biking through appeared narrower than the bicycle. There were no major incidents. I did one wicked jump. Jen thought it was awesome.

After that we biked to DEATH VALLEY… AAAAAGHHH! It was fine. No death to speak of. We climbed up really large sand dunes and threw rocks over the edge. It was scenic and beautiful up there. Very lunar landscape all around.

We biked back and ate dinner in a restaurant with a hole cut in its roof and a fire pit in the middle. It wasn’t until the next night that we realized that every restaurant in town had this feature.

The next day we rented better bikes and went to the salt lagunas south of town, about 30km away. This was as close to the Bugs Bunny dying of thirst in the desert aesthetic that we came. Several times the sand under us was too soft to bike on, so we had to push our bikes. The lagunas were amazingly salty. It’s hard to describe being that buoyant; it was completely impossible not to float. Like, if you roll onto your front it’s uncomfortable because the stiffness of your spine makes keeping your head above water difficult!

I was reading Frank Herbert’s classic Dune during all of this travel through the desert, which added a very special dimension to the book. Somehow I missed reading this book when I was younger, and I thought it was fantastic! I think it’s the best sci-fi book I’ve ever read, in fact. One great idea described in the book is a stillsuit, which desert dwellers wear to recapture, filter, and store all of the wastewater of the human body. Stinky.

We were totally caked in salt even after much drying and wiping off, like the one or two ridiculously over-salted dry roasted peanuts at the bottom of every jar. Things like nostrils and inner ears were especially affected. Fortunately the hostel guy let us take a shower before getting on the overnight bus to Arica.

Arica is a beach/border town in the far north of Chile. We stayed at a nice hostel with good WiFi and drank Pisco Sours with a bunch of Swiss people, who threatened to come and stay with us in Canada. The highlight of Arica was the bird sanctuary north of town. We spent the afternoon hanging out with brown Pelicans there, and trying to decide what to do next.

The answer was Arequipa, Peru, but first we had to cross the Chile-Peru border. The easiest way to do this was to hire a person to drive you in their car, so we walked down to the designated pick-up place, and found a well-dressed 60-ish lady with blond hair and green eye shadow, and she escorted us to her 1983 Cadillac El Dorado where we waited for three others to fill the car. Once inside, the Cadillac revealed all of its secrets to us: Plastic wood-grained removable faceplate stereo, aftermarket turbo pressure gauge mounted to the left of the steering wheel, and 3-on-the-tree transmission. This lady didn’t mess around, and she whisked us through the border crossing with winks and smiles for all the guards.

We stayed in Arequipa for about two weeks. The city itself was pretty boring. A colonial town made of Silar, a white stone. The highlight of the city was the Santa Catalina Monastery, which is a fortress taking up about three city blocks, and still houses about 25 nuns. In its heyday from the 17th to 19th century, nuns would enter at the age of about 13 and would NEVER LEAVE THE BUILDING. So there was plenty to do in there, like, harpsichord… and praying… and thinking about harpsichord… and needlepoint. At first it’s tempting to think that a lot of great art and important thought must have come out of this type of place… until you realize that all the people inside must have had the mentality and world-awareness of highly religious 13-year-old girls - lots of good pony-and-rainbow art perhaps.

Anyway, the monastery itself was really interesting – a city within a city - and we had a great guide who loved earthquakes. Earthquakes frequently rock the city and destroy inferiorly built parts of the monastery. She told us great stories about particularly weird nuns that had lived there. One nun, fond of self-flagellation, actually died of tetanus (from the metal fixtures on her flagellum) in the kneeling position. She was widely celebrated for her devotion and asceticism, and was held up as a shining example of good behaviour to the other nuns. Another nun walked to the convent all the way from Bolivia, and spent the last 15 years of her life deaf and blind. She was also a great star and heroine to future nuns.

A note about public transit in Peru: It’s all done with Toyota vans! The Toyota Van was introduced to North America in 1984, and was replaced by the bloated and americanized Previa in 1991. But Japan never stopped making the original and shipping them all over the world. Many variations based on the original platform followed over the years. About half of all the vehicles on the road here are Toyota vans, which makes me very happy. The most common are 2WD Diesel HiAce vans which they use as public busses (combis). They’re pretty cool. But I’d get a 4WD Turbo-Diesel TownAce MoonSystem MasterAce.

We stayed in a great hostel in Arequipa called Los Torres de Ugarte, run by a family of very friendly and accommodating people. They had excellent wireless internet and a good breakfast, all for $20/day, so it was very easy to work, relax, and watch NBA basketball playoffs.

Just before we left we visited the country club and played some basketball, which required the purchase of a tastefully decorated Shaq ball. The embarrassment of owning the ball was mitigated by the fact that I actually am Shaq-like compared to your average b-ball player here. I spent hours waiting for a group of guys who would provide some good 2-on-2, but the tallest guy on the courts couldn’t have been more than 5’7”. We donated the ball to the son of one of the hostel workers, for which she was extremely grateful.

Next stop - Titicaca.

Snakes, Spiders, Fluffy Kittens...

Salta is a city in the North of Argentina that is surrounded by many different strange natural wonders, like salt flats, cloud forests, deserts, and rumpsteak. The city buzzes with activity, and the sidewalks are very narrow and riddled with schoolchildren and piles of rubble. The schoolchildren feed on the piles of rubble, but only nocturnally.

After settling in to a hotel close to the plaza, we took a walk up the hill which is about a 10 minute walk from the hotel, called Cerro San Bernardo. At this latitude (about S 25 degrees) things are starting to get warmer and junglier in parts. This means deadly animals. The first large message we received from Pachamama to this effect was the uninterrupted canopy of giant spiderwebs (and accompanying giant spiders) during the walk to the top of the hill.

We had a short guided tour of the jungle by a very nice guy named Raoul, who explained that there are only three really deadly snake species available for use in the area. Rattlesnakes (Jarara), Coral snakes, and Deadly Green Snakes Without Clear English Counterpart (Urutu). Deadly spiders can also be encountered. More on both of these later.

We saw posters all over town... it looked like Queen was playing Friday night. So that was obviously an opportunity that couldn't be missed. We bought tickets, put leftover gin in a Nalgene bottle, and wandered into the auditorium.

It would be unfair to expect an all-around successful imitation of Freddy Mercury. But this guy had the looks (sort of... add about 50 pounds of weird gym muscle), and the "look at me all the time" disease. It was, of course, the music that suffered. But once or twice, after a lot of gin, when the lights were low and the crowd was excited, we truly believed that we were watching Queen.

There were a couple of unforgettable lyrics problems:
1) "WE WON'T, WE WON'T.... ROCK YOU...."
2) "WE ARE THE CHAMPGNONS, MY FRIENDS..."

Our first out-of-town adventure was to THE CLOUD FORESTS OF SAN LORENZO. For the first time we had to hire a guide for a mutli-day hike because the region has no maps, and because the land is mostly private. We inquired after the availability of Lando Calrissian, but he was on vacation. The guy we settled for, Rafael, met us at the trailhead at 10AM and we set out on a three-day adventure into the hills.

Rafael, who is the same age as Jen (12), was born and raised in San Lorenzo, and he has built up a relationship with the farmers that live in the valleys in the cloud forests during his time exploring and guiding. He is basically the only guy who leads treks in the region, so we felt very lucky to be doing it.

There was also a French guy who came along, named Xavier. He is a cameraman, but it's the off-season, so there he was, with us in the cloud forests. He was a very nice, funny, and relaxed guy who was a pleasure to share the experience with.

So the cloud forest is just like it sounds. You are either in clouds, looking down on clouds, or looking across valleys at clouds. At moments the forest felt enchanted and old... then the clouds would blow off and the mood would totally change. Pictures don't really do it justice, but have a look anyway.

We made close friends with cows during the hike, and camped with their waste. Cow patties are actually really clean though, I hope, right? Yeah. By the end of the trip I was using cow patties to store cooking utensils, support reading material, and as a cumin substitute.

Other highlights were chicken-squeezing contests, and getting a chance to rest for a while and hang out with some of the farmers in the remote valleys. They have lived on these farms for generations. Their homes are very simple, but they have everything they need to live efficiently and without want of goat cheese. We had a chance to taste some of the goat cheese, and it was incredible... The real deal... Full of flavours that get boiled, beaten, or otherwise factory-filtered out of North American goats and their cheeses.

On the last day of hiking Jen had a very special moment. The order of hiking was Rafa-Xavi-Jen-Neil. For the sake of reference, I will now introduce a spot on the trail which I will call Spot X. Rafa and Xavi cleared Spot X without incident. Jen approached Spot X, stopped, pointed, and screamed for her life with four or five short bursts of utterly terror-filled shrieking.

So the rest of us stopped and looked down at her feet just in time to see the tail of a meter-long snake disappear into the jungle. But it had left a bloodied rat for us on Spot X - proof that we weren't just imagining things. Jen says that the other two guys just stepped over the coiled snake as though it was a cow patty, not seeing it for what it was. By the time she had reached Spot X, the snake was freaked out a bit and decided to leave its kill for later (or maybe never).

The tragedy here is that I love snakes - the deadlier the better - and Jen doesn't. There was so much savage beauty there to be enjoyed (or screamed at, or whatever). The only savage beauty I got out of the deal was the dead rat. They are totally boring.

Back to Salta, and another week of working and walking around town. Salta is really nice. Jen likes it very much because of all the Gauchitude...

Our last weekend before leaving town we spent driving a circuit south of the city which passes through some incredible scenic ravines and valleys, and the towns of Cafayate and Cachi. We camped for three nights in municipal campgrounds/stockyards. Roosters are included - no continental breakfast.

We picked up our VW Gol on Friday afternoon. This is not a typo. The VW S.A. marketing forces have decided that it would be excessive use of plastic to include the "f" in "Golf". Really I think the explanation is that VW S.A. feared that using the name "Golf", which has achieved great purchase in Argentina as the brand name of a mixture of mustard and mayo, would cause consumers to mistake their cars for a pale-yellow condiment. On with the story...

We drove south through incredible red eroded rock formations to a place called Cafayate, famous for its white wine (Torrontés, the grape is called). We set up at what we thought was a military base campground (because of the military Land Cruiser in the parking lot), and woke up the next day eager to start a hike up to some 10m waterfalls hidden in a ravine. The walk in was amazing. The trail was not very well marked, so we felt a genuine sense of adventure finding the safest route up the river. This hike will stand out as one of my favourites I think, owing mainly to that sense of adventure.

We found the falls at last, and we were the only ones there. The water was painfully cold, but I was determined to stand under the waterfalls, just like the beautiful girls in the brochures, so out I went. The total body pain was one thing, then you get water pounding into the back of your head from 10m... That night I thought I was catching the flu, but in retrospect I think it was my body telling me never ever to do that kind of thing again.

We hiked back down and began the drive north to Cachi. This drive was very dry and lunar, with cactus forests lining the road. We decided to stop short of Cachi in a place called Molinos, because we were running out of daylight. We stayed in another campground/military base, easy to find because of the Land Cruiser parked out front... but on closer inspection I realized that this Land Cruiser had a Swiss ID sticker on the back!!! Hold on... So it turned out to be the same vehicle that we had seen the night before in Cafayate that had made us think it was a military base!

We caught up with the owners of the vehicle, a really nice Swiss couple named Claude and Erika, and part of their long and very rich story. The vehicle was a motorhome conversion of a 1997 Land Cruiser pickup truck built custom by a firm in Germany, and shipped across the Altantic into the port of Buenos Aires. The entire power system was run on diesel, including cooking, water heating, and space heating. This was not the first trip for them in their beautiful motorhome... they had been back and forth from Europe to Asia several times, and this was the beginning of what will be a 5ish-year tour of the Americas. Anyway, we had a couple of great conversations with them, and we reminisced about Yukon with Aaron and his Class-C Dodge Sportsman a couple of years ago.

The next day's drive from Cachi to Chicoana (very close to Salta) saw the scenery change abruptly, again. We started out in dry cactus forests, then up and over a high pass (3700m) into green hills and grasses covering red rocky outcroppings. Bird life here was amazing... Then back into cloud forests as we got closer Chicoana.

During the drive we zinged over something hairy and eight-legged. Ha! Savage beauty, here we come! I pulled over, grabbed the camera, and yes, we spent some time with a Tarantula in the wild. Wow. Hairy. Being so far from its crypt, or whatever they live in, it was probably going to the hairdresser's.

Now on to Chile. As in, Voodoo Chile.