Next stop was a short 1 hour plane trip from Puerto Igazu to Salta in Argentina. Salta was going to be our base to check out Jujuy (Hoohoi) to the North with the colourful hills and Cafayate, a high altitude wine region to the South.
Our first day in Salta we visited the Museum of the Mountain Children. Here they tell you about the customs of the Inca’s before the Spanish influence and how they treated the mountains and the areas around. They basically thought the mountains were gods and therefore they offered sacrifices to the mountains… So… herein came the sacrifice of their best, prettiest children!! They would have a big ceremony, marry two of the children from the community which apparently brought the community closer together, then they would give the children alcohol in which case they would go to sleep, and the children would be buried, or left in stone rooms with the mountain.
The museum had 3 children who had been preserved and found in the mountains. They had been preserved because of the altitude and air pressure high up where they were left. The museum would have 1 mummy on display at a time, we saw a little girl about 12 years old and she had been struck by lightning at some point while up there (after she was already dead). A video showed an interview with the local people who to this day say the children “weren’t sacrificed, they were just given to the mountain”…. Um… in a sacrificial way… Ha! They actually believed that the children were passing straight through to another realm that would be better for them. So sad!! I kept thinking what it would be like to watch this girl be resurrected, you could see her teeth, and her face and she looked so pretty!! It will be a very cool time Jehovah wakes her and many others up from their sleep.
While we were in Salta there was a massive religious procession going on around the streets. People had done a pilgrimage from surrounding areas and had posters of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. The aim of the procession seemed to be to make as MUCH noise as possible! They had drums, trumpets, anything they could bang and cars were following the procession honking their horns, the ambulance and police were also in the procession with the sirens blaring! Oh… and I shouldn’t forget the BAD karaoke of people singing into microphones being carried by bikes as well… So yea… very noisey! And got the local peoples attention… At one point, so many people were walking down the street and the only thing protecting us from getting swept up in the procession was a tree people had to walk around!!
After a day in Salta we realised the best way to see all the areas was to hire a car. We also met up with Wei-fong an old school friend of mine who happened to arrive in Salta the same day we did! So she and another traveller she’d made friends with jumped in the hire car with us and we headed up North into the state of Jujuy to see the towns of Purmamarca and stay in Tilcara overnight.
Purmamarca is the home of the “Hill of 7 colours”. The town is at the foot of this gorgeous view of the hills, there looks like heaps of walking trails to explore the mountains here as well. We unfortunately didn’t have time to do the walks so we just walked up a couple of hills to some good vantage points. Pictures again aren’t like the real thing but hopefully you get the point!
We stayed in Tilcara that night, a tiny town at around 2,500m above sea level. This is what we thought South Amercia would be more like!!! Tiny houses made of straw and mud and rock. Dirt streets, ponchos and horses everywhere! It was a really cute town and we tried our first taste of Llama meat! We had a Llama hamburger at lunch and Matt had a llama steak at dinner. I found it a bit of a bland meat, I think with some nice marinating it would be fine though!
The next day we sad goodbye to Weif and her friend Joost and we headed back to Salta and then South of Salta towards Cafayate.
Road block
Between Jujuy and Salta on the auto-pista or freeway a bunch of cars suddenly came to a halt and there was smoke up ahead so we figured there’d been an accident. We soon realised there was no accident but an apparently regular occurring ROAD BLOCK! A bunch of guys in hoodies had put tyres on the street and light a fire and were protesting something, we don’t know what. So with the help of google maps and a few directions we could only guess the meaning of with our limited Spanish, we headed towards the town to bypass the freeway. Suddenly thoughts of “Is this what they wanted us to do? Drive into the town so they can get us?” started to go through our heads… we followed a series of cars though so felt safe while we were around more people. We took a wrong turn and headed down a lonely road so quickly ABOUT FACED and headed back to the main street. Soon enough we were back on the auto pista and heading to our intended destination.
We did have a laugh about the road block though because Police turned up… but just stood there and didn’t really do anything. If it were any Western Country they’d be put in the bag of the paddy wagon and escorted to the lock up. Well maybe not… but it wouldn’t happen!!! Hahaha
Our destination was the Highland winery region of Cafayate, 4 hours to the South of Salta. The drive was a bit nothing until we were about an hour out of Cafayte. Then we drove through this beautiful rocky valley that had a river dividing the wind blown, sandstone, reddish mountains. There was another “Devils Throat” which they seem to call everything that is a semicircle shape here! It was a big cut out of the side of the mountain. All pictures below will attempt to show you how pretty it was!!
So we arrived in Cafayate just before dark and after all the wineries had closed… Bang head. But the drive had been beautiful. The town was again really quaint and had heaps of Northern Argentinian character. We had a great meal at a local restaurant and sampled the local wine (delish) and off to bed!!
Unfortunately we never got to visit any of the wineries there because we only had the car for one more day and we wanted to drive along a “famous” train line that had been built here. The train line is called “Train of the Clouds” and was built to transport goods up to the town of “” at 4,500m. By the time the train line was finished it was no longer needed as they’d built a road and started carrying goods that way (seems to happen a lot with trains!). So the train is just for tourists now, is REALLY slow and QUITE expensive. So we decided to drive it. There’s apparently some gorgeous bridges high in the sky and cool things to see along the drive… But we either missed it, or it wasn’t as impressive as they made it out to be. I think the photographer who took promotional pictures of the bridges had made them look way bigger than they were.
In the end we drove up to the town at the top of the hill and went over a pass that was 4,800m above sea level. We got out of the car and took about 10 quick steps up a hill and realised why you don’t do anything quickly at high altitude!! You feel like you’ve lost your breath and you can’t get it back!! SO you have to concentrate really hard to breath deeply and slowly and remain calm. We quickly recovered from our experiment and continued on. Only to have the tyre blow out on the car a bit further down the hill!
The town at the top was a dessert town! It wasn’t pretty, it was mega windy, and dusty, and so all the shops and houses had hardly any windows and were all closed up to stop the dust and wind wreaking havouc with everything. So we walked into a “café” (a big open room with a TV and a lady watching it sitting by the fire) and had a coke… hehe. We decided to give the lady some Spanish mags we had with us as she looked so lonely and sad and she was happy to take them! Then she went and showed us that she had the December 2012 mags too!!! So even in the remotest of places they know who the Witnesses are! It was pretty cool!
So it was back to Salta, to find out we had to pay for the broken tyre. Spew!! But it was in the contract so what can you do. And then we arranged our bus to San Pedro de Atacama, the Northen part of Chile for that evening! It left at 1am!
Timeframe: 13th – 17th September 2013
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