Sunday in Salta

I’m back in Salta for a couple of days after disappearing into the Quebrada de Humahuaca for a week or so. The what de what? A rainbow made of rock, is what it is. A world heritage listed valley in the Andes, 130 kilometres long and 3,000 metres high, where the colours vary from champagne to claret, from marmalade to cocoa, from sunburn to seaweed in the space of a hillside. And then there are the shapes – dripping candle wax and frozen tsunami, fluted organ pipe and dinosaur’s shoulder and flared stalagmite, on a monumental scale. There are pre-Inca pueblos and whitewashed churches and the relics of a toy train. More of all this in a minute.

Salta is a pleasant little town which makes a handy hub for the psychedelic desert of the altoplano. There is the inevitable town square, with its equestrian statue and surrounding buildings which feature every type of arch known to architecture. There is a cathedral the colour of fairy floss, and a 17th century Spanish colonial town hall, and a former governor’s mansion in the beaux arts style so favoured in Buenos Aires, with round apertures and an arched french window set into a top floor wall which slopes gently back from the façade. Most of them seem to house cafes these days, wi-fi enabled and bouncing with bonhomie. I found one this morning which offered a handy buffet breakfast – juice and coffee and fruit, croissants and danish, ham and salami and cheese and rolls, crème caramel and chocolate torte, for 15 pesos. That’s $5 to you folks back home. I was glad of it, tiring as I am of the usual jam and baguette.

The rest of the town is a one way grid of low terraces, with barely a traffic light and no stop or give way signs, where everyone is expected to look out at each intersection and decide on the spot who has right of way. It works surprisingly well, with traffic flowing in a constant limbo of accelration and deceleration, encouraged by the deep dips in the tarmac at many of the crossroads. There are tombola shops almost on every corner – the Saltans seem to be ardent lottery lovers - and apartments with little vestibules lined with faded tiles and carved doors, and beaten up pickups piled high with oranges for sale. That kind of thing. One feature I find a little unnerving – there are still posters around from the last election, and one of the candidates bears a striking resemblance to Ray Martin, only younger and better looking, and minus the gap in the teeth. His name is Fernando Yarade, pronounced I think like ‘charade’, or possibly ‘charaday’. He promises change – ‘cambio’. I saw the posters right up in the Quebrada, in villages where the locals are still partial to pre-columbian mountain gods, and have no electricity. Odd to stumble across a grinning Ray up there, every hair in its right place, pushing cambio.

Speaking of such things, there are a couple of excellent museums in Salta, one of which is largely dedicated to the mummies of three children sacrificed by the Incas on Mount Llullaillaco (‘Shushaishaco’) a few hundred kilometres from here. The bodies date from the 15th century and were preserved by the cold, and were discovered in 1999. They are said to be the best preserved of all Inca mummies. They are put on display one at a time on six month rotation, and the one that’s on show at the moment is a six-year-old girl, sitting cross legged, eyes closed, her mouth open with her teeth showing, as if she’s just dozed off. She wears a shawl with a silver pin and one of those woolly hats which cover the ears, but her braids show through at the front. She would be perfect except for a long ago lightning strike which slightly blackened part of her face. She was sacrificed to appease the mountain gods, which control as much as anything the availability of water, which is scarce on this side of the Andes. It was shocking until I walked out and faced a building exalting a being said to have sacrificed his own son for all our sakes.

There are some great people on the road in Argentina, quite a few of whom seem to be French. I’m not sure if there’s a reason for this, other than it being la vogue en France at the moment. I headed for the Quebrada with a London-based Serbian graphic designer named Georgie and his French girlfriend, Ann-Claire. I spoke French with her (and taught Georgie useful terms such as ‘lager lout’, ‘redneck’ and ‘white trash’) and she screwed up her face at first, as French people will when subjected to someone mauling their language. I’m sure her English was fine but I persisted, partly to relieve my embarrassment at my complete lack of Spanish. I left them at Purmamarca, the first town in the valley, which huddles in the crook of an elbow of geology known as the Cerro de los Siete Colores (the Hill of Seven Colours). There wasn’t a lot to do there except admire the colours, and even that was difficult when the day after my arrival turned out to be the coldest I’ve experienced in this country. It was freezing and windy and overcast, and by the end of the day a very light snow fell for a couple of hours. I broke out my thermals for the first and so far last time on this trip, because the day after the weather reverted to its normal sunny warmth and has remained so ever since. Apparently it’s like this year round. The Tropic of Capricorn crosses the highway close to Purmamarca.

Not liking the look of the day I took an excursion in a bus to the Salinas Grandes, a big salt field that lay on the other side of a 4,000 metre pass. We cleared the cloud just before the pass and out on the pans a warm(ish) wind was blowing. The locals have been trading the salt up into Bolivia for centuries, and there were perfect rectangles dug in neat rows where it is still mined. We visited a refectory for the miners whose walls, roof, tables and chairs were made entirely of salt bricks. There was even a salty shrine for a salty saint. I got talking to a couple of Germans from Berlin, one of whom spoke good French, and the other of whom spoke English about as good as my French, and Spanish. We had a dinner of barbecued llama, pork, beef and lamb, followed by quinoa flan (yes quinoa really is a word) and made feasible conversation in three languages, or four if you include ordering the food.

The road is tracked by what would be a shoo-in for a list of the world’s most spectacular railways (or a book on the subject which some photo-hack is sure to want to do) if it still ran. Unfortunately it doesn’t. It was once a tiny narrow gauge line with cute stations and riveted water tanks and sheds with arched openings, now bricked up with breezeblocks and turned into markets selling cheap clothes. I watched it go by when the scenery got too dazzling, its steel girder bridges and faded level crossing signs, its tracks which sometimes would disappear altogether only to emerge again suddenly from the earth, or poke out from a crumbling embankment like bones from an ancient mound. Some of the bridges were covered with ancient graffiti, and one, solid-sided and studded with rivets like a World War One tank, had been turned ninety degrees by some sudden torrent. It all seemed somehow more authentic than the Trene de las Nubes (Train to the Clouds), a line refurbished for tourists which takes a 15-hour round trip up to 4,200m. It costs $US120 for the day. I haven’t bothered.

I ended the journey up the Quebrada at Iruya, a tiny town high in the mountains, two hours along a dirt road which breasts a pass before descending into the next valley via a set of twenty-odd switchbacks neatly laid out on a broad hillside. From a distance the mountains look velvety and smooth but close up they are loose conglomerate slopes, cracked and fissured by long ago deluges and feathered with hardy tussocks. We dropped to the valley floor, a wide rocky riverbed where a narrow stream braided and sparkled, and followed this to the town, which sits like a Greek village in the midst of what looks like a gigantic cave that has had its roof removed. A squat, lemon-coloured church dominates the gap where the shoulder of a hill has collapsed, and is surrounded by what gigantic stalagmites, their sides split by erosion and striped by what look like dribbles of black paint. The town ascends a flat-topped sugarloaf at a steepening angle until a single cobbled street twists itself round the flank of the hill, ending at a peak marked by a white cross and a bristle of antennas. I ensconced myself into a hostel called the Maté-Bar, a two room adobe hut nestled at the bottom of a set of round-topped rock pillars shaped like melting snowmen. The place was owned by a cheery bearded man named Oliver, and the other guests were a couple of Breton medical students and a very bright lad called Julien who at the age of 22 or 23 had already done an internship in Washington, lobbying senators on energy policy. That evening Oliver made an asado (barbecue) with hunks of beef, pork sausages, roasted capsicum, enamel jugs full of malbec and litre bottles of Salta stout. The revels continued till 6am, with violin playing, guitar strumming, pan pipe blowing and Breton folk dancing. The girls translated my French into Spanish for Oliver, and Julien translated my English into French for the girls. They only scrunched their faces a little bit, and only at the beginning. Oliver had already told them I was Austrian, so I suppose the only way was up.

The next day was a day of pure rest in the bright Andean sun, and the one after that I hiked up to San Isidro, a village further up the valley. There, opening a door to a house in search of some advertised empanadas, I came across Theo, a porteno (Buenos Airean) sitting calmly behind a Leica. He had been a photographer until a couple of years ago, when he’d left it behind to become an engineer in the navy. The reason? ‘How do you say in English? Starvation.’ But life wasn’t all bad. He’d formed a company with some friends and spent months at a time custom building yachts in other parts of the world. He’d been to China and Morocco, and he’s off to Italy in a couple of weeks. The Argentinian navy sounds like a highly tolerant employer, or perhaps it’s not that busy. Or maybe they’re keeping an eye on what the Moroccans are up to.

Theo asked to see my pictures of the condor – I think he wasn’t really convinced it was one – so I pulled out the laptop, which I hadn’t been willing to leave in the hostel. I showed it to Theresa, the lady of the house, and her two sons – the village had no electricity, and I suspect they hadn’t seen a computer before. We ran through the pictures of the condor, and then I looked for something else to show them. The first ones I came across were from Che Guevara’s house, so I turned to Theresa and said the name, expecting a light of peasant rebellion to flash in her eyes. Blank stare instead. ‘She won’t give a toss about Che Guevara,’ said Theo (his actual language was stronger). ‘Show her Buenos Aires.’ So I did.

Outside, Ray Martin was still grinning.

Well I could go on about the ethnological museum with its icons of musket-toting European angels, where the directors bowl you over with their enthusiasm and explain every feathered headdress and silver breastplate in voluble Anglo-Spanish, or the feast of San Roque which takes place today, where the townspeople carry their poodles in procession through the streets to be blessed at the church of San Francisco, but it’s pushing 10pm and I still have to buy food and pack my backpack, download my pictures, upload this and with any luck finish Graham Greene’s memoirs before I go to bed. Tomorrow I head in a hired car with three Austrians for the the Quebrada de Cafayate, which is supposed to be even more spectacular than Humahuaca, though I can’t imagine how. So I guess I’ll call it a night.