I’m in the Tucuman bus station right now. I have a layover here for about four hours until I hop the night bus to Cordoba. It’s Friday night and the place is hopping. There’s a live musician plugged into an amp and he’s singing and playing a tango version of Frank Sinatra’s, “I Did It My Way” while his guitar gently weeps. These are the little, surreal moments that travel is made of.
I left Cafayete this afternoon, and I was sad to go even though the place may, in all likelihood, have a curse on it.
Here’s why. I had the single worst travel day on the trip so far while here. It was one of those days where anything you try to do, no matter how inconsequential or minor, let alone the big things (and there were several), just wouldn’t… go. No matter how much coercion, praying, force of will or how many deep breaths or secret promises for paying it forward. And the big things were big. Like being on my last 50 pesos (about US$12.50), but still owing my hostel for two days of room and a tour and still having two full days in town ahead of me before I caught my pre-purchased bus ticket to Tucuman – and my card wouldn’t work in either of the two cash machines in town. And no way to contact my bank because there was no Skype at the internet cafes and the hostel wifi was busted. So stuff like that. It was Catch-22 after Catch-22. Each time I tried to solve a problem, the solution to that problem was actually just another problem that needed to be solved. And it all had to be done in Spanish, which I don’t speak.
It was the single most frustrating day I’ve had on this trip so far and I have to admit, I got to that point – you know, where you start to feel that little kid frustration, so powerless and overwhelmed. Well, I had a moment in the hostel kitchen when I broke down and shed a couple of hot tears while my voice, quavering, told my hostel-mate Laura from Buenos Aires, what was going on. She was great and told me that she’d help me sort out all the issues tomorrow.
As it turned out, Bertrand, another person from my hostel helped me solve my biggest challenge. He spent 20 minutes on the phone with the agency in Jujuy who booked my air travel to Mendoza and sorted the issue out for me by actually going to Jujuy and the agency to take care of it for me. Something I love about travel is that people can really step up and help one another. It’s great to be reminded that we can’t survive alone, that we depend on each other to make it through life’s difficulties, and that we do step up and help one another.
As far as cash? The wifi in the hostel got fixed, I Skyped my bank, and all issues are now resolved. I didn’t have to devise an elaborate plan to hop a bus with my last 50 pesos to some other town in the middle of the night, get money from another town’s ATM, and hop back to Cafayete to pay people before they noticed I was gone. Whew. That would have been an inconvenient drag.
Besides the whole curse thing, Cafayete is wonderful. As one of the top two wine producing regions in Argentina, it carries a beautiful mood about it. The town square is picturesque and charming. The people mellow. The countryside is stunning with tall desert mountains in beautiful deep clay and green colors. The fields of grapevines curling around their posts and strings, clusters of ripe fruit hanging in the hot sun.
In Cafayete, I love that a very hearty pour of any restaurant’s or café’s house Malbec is $1.10 USD… and it’s good. I love that my hostel felt so comfortable, clean, and homey, with actual attention to décor, a great center patio where we all could gather and have a glass of wine or a cup of mate tea and talk about our days, and a well maintained kitchen for cooking.
I loved the areas around Cafayete for their incredible, heart expanding beauty and proud history and heritage. I loved the people I met at my hostel, all of whom were entertaining, funny, sweet, helpful, wry, interesting, or a combination of all those traits.
I loved the House of Empanadas, who served me the best empanadas I’ve had either in Brazil or Argentina.
Details, you ask? Happy to.
One day, I took a tour in the afternoon to visit the major landmarks of the Quebrada de Cafayete, the region I passed through on the bus trip from Salta to Cafayete but was pretty much too sick to actually appreciate. So let me preface this next part with a disclaimer. If you’re tired of hearing about how unbelievably beautiful the mountains are in Northern Argentina, stop reading now. OK, you’re still reading. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
It seems like, since I arrived in Argentina, the scope and scale of these mountains, their intensity in every way, have grown. The colors, the scale, the sheer force of them. First there was the Seven Colors Mountains in Humahuaca/Purmamarca. Then there was the next level, the Quebrada del Torro, with its height and its gauchos and its lonely beauty. And now Quebrada de Cafayete, with its tremendous scale, its rock formations so unique and unusual that they didn’t seem at all real, but maybe something out of an epic hero’s story or something on the far side of Mars. Rubies, rusts, oranges, pinks, clays, ochres… and also blues, violets, greens, and yellows. With their immensity so intense that the eyes just can’t see them, but flatten them out like a paint by numbers to just try and absorb them.
I saw these with Neil, who had just arrived at my hostel that day. Neil is a 31-year old freelance carpenter from Dublin, but living in Melbourne. A month ago, he was on a three day party streak in Melbourne and, while intoxicated during said three day streak:
· Decided that he had to travel to South America and figure out if he wanted to move there
· Logged onto a website, priced tickets and bought his one way plane ticket to Buenos Aires
· Packed and caught a taxi to the airport
· Rung up his Mum from the airport and told her he was leaving in an hour for South America and wasn’t sure when he was coming back
· Boarded the plane and immediately asked the flight attendant for a beer because he had “flight anxiety.” Sadly, he was turned down, the attendant saying that she couldn’t serve him until they took off. They took off, and he was served.
So Neil and I happened to be the only two people on this tour. There’s nothing like getting to know a crazy Dubliner over some of the most beautiful natural scenery in the world.
We stopped at several key formations and vista points to appreciate the rock formations the likes of which rival or surpass Monument Valley, Utah and the scale of which makes Monument Valley look like building blocks from a child’s toy box. We saw the sweeping playas and peaks, the mountains stretching back millions of years and looking ahead for millions more. The naturally-formed amphitheater, which was once a huge cave in the rock then was opened up by eons of rain and wind erosion. In this amphitheater, Cafayete has an annual music festival to take advantage of the incredible acoustics this naturally-formed amphitheater provides. I wish I could explain the scale of this formation. My pictures, for the most part, don’t capture it. Except for one. In this picture, you see the layers of compressed minerals and rock in beautiful arching and swaying patterns. And then, at the lower right center of the picture, you see a tiny speck. That’s Neil. That’s the scale we’re talking about.
We also visited the Devil’s Throat, another incredible formation equally massive and equally as impressive and awe-inspiring as the amphitheater. Here, I kicked in my rock climbing skills and scaled some short and easy faces to crawl inside the Devil’s Throat. The colors, the patterns, the scale. I felt dumbstruck.
These places throw me into simultaneous states of awe and confusion. As I marvel at them and am rendered speechless by their ancientness and immensity, I also think of how we humans have this odd tendency to think the world revolves around us. When in reality, the world is more ancient and more powerful than we could ever comprehend. It will live on millions of years past any memory of our species and will continue to be part of the grand scheme as it came into being at the beginning of time. And even how ideas like time, when used with these places, are simply weak constructs that humans have created to try and classify and understand and place and compare ourselves next to them.
That’s what these places, this excruciating beauty and immensity, are doing with me. I’m properly put in my place and get a tiny glimpse into the immensity and wide open infiniteness of space and time and mass and energy and spirit and physics and math and art, which are flimsy expressions of something nameless, unspeakable, limitless. Something unclassifiable and indescribable. Something infinitely beyond anything we can ever grasp. And that’s right and perfect.
But I digress.
While in Cafayete, I also visited the ruins of Quilmes. I took this tour, about an hour outside Cafayete, with Guillaume from Nice, who had also arrived the same day as Neil. His dry French sense of humor and vow each day that he was going to quit smoking today (“no really, today for sure, I just want to finish this pack…”) prompted me poke him in the ribs with a wry smile. Dating about 1000 AD, Quilmes was a complex indigenous urban settlement that occupied about 30 hectares and was home to about 5000 inhabitants. These people survived contact with the Inca, which occurred from about 1480 on, but sadly, they couldn’t withstand the onslaught of the Spaniards who in 1667 deported the last 2000 inhabitants to Buenos Aires. The site itself is impressive. Though no building still stands, a good percentage of the foundations of the site have been excavated. The foundations start at the base of a large hill and crawl up the hill in steps. I hiked up the treacherous hill to see the community layed out before me, making geometric patterns in the hillside.
When I arrived on the site, I was given a brochure in “Spanglish” explaining the story behind Quilmes. But fundamentally, what the brochure really was was an angry tirade against the invaders who broke apart the Quilmes community, which was rich with culture, heritage, history, and indigenous identity. It spoke of never allowing this type of invasion to happen again and called out to readers to vehemently support the preservation of indigenous people and Pachamama (translation: Mother Earth). It also called for things like restitution and reclamation of the tribal lands. In short, Quilmes is a symbol of all the genocide and destruction that non-native people have brought to Argentina and how change must occur to preserve these indigenous cultures.
I’m often struck by how the history of colonialism the world over is so bloody and horrible. And how it’s still occurring today under the auspices of “spreading democracy and promoting a free-market economy.” Sigh.
I also mountain biked while in Cafayete. I wanted to head up to the path that would take me to the falls at the Rio Colorado. I came across a rattlesnake on my way. Yes, another snake. I didn’t see it, but I definitely heard it. I was walking my bike past a cluster of low rocks and I heard a rattle. As I got closer, it sped up, and as I passed by and went on my way, it slowed and stopped. And the funny thing was, I didn’t even realize what it was until later. Oops. I should know better being from Oregon and California. This is snake story #3, just for the record.
Also, on my mountain bike ride, I had the chance to ride past several beautiful fields of grapevines and wineries (and did some tastings, of course). It was quite picturesque, with the green vines and dusty earth set against the tall blue-green mountains.
When all is said and done, despite the travel challenges I faced, I come away from Cafayete loving its beauty and uniqueness.
I guess, then, that Cafayete isn’t cursed at all. It’s blessed.
I’m in the Tucuman bus station right now. I have a layover here for about four hours until I hop the night bus to Cordoba. It’s Friday night and the place is hopping. There’s a live musician plugged into an amp and he’s singing and playing a tango version of Frank Sinatra’s, “I Did It My Way” while his guitar gently weeps. These are the little, surreal moments that travel is made of.
I left Cafayete this afternoon, and I was sad to go even though the place may, in all likelihood, have a curse on it.
Here’s why. I had the single worst travel day on the trip so far while here. It was one of those days where anything you try to do, no matter how inconsequential or minor, let alone the big things (and there were several), just wouldn’t… go. No matter how much coercion, praying, force of will or how many deep breaths or secret promises for paying it forward. And the big things were big. Like being on my last 50 pesos (about US$12.50), but still owing my hostel for two days of room and a tour and still having two full days in town ahead of me before I caught my pre-purchased bus ticket to Tucuman – and my card wouldn’t work in either of the two cash machines in town. And no way to contact my bank because there was no Skype at the internet cafes and the hostel wifi was busted. So stuff like that. It was Catch-22 after Catch-22. Each time I tried to solve a problem, the solution to that problem was actually just another problem that needed to be solved. And it all had to be done in Spanish, which I don’t speak.
It was the single most frustrating day I’ve had on this trip so far and I have to admit, I got to that point – you know, where you start to feel that little kid frustration, so powerless and overwhelmed. Well, I had a moment in the hostel kitchen when I broke down and shed a couple of hot tears while my voice, quavering, told my hostel-mate Laura from Buenos Aires, what was going on. She was great and told me that she’d help me sort out all the issues tomorrow.
As it turned out, Bertrand, another person from my hostel helped me solve my biggest challenge. He spent 20 minutes on the phone with the agency in Jujuy who booked my air travel to Mendoza and sorted the issue out for me by actually going to Jujuy and the agency to take care of it for me. Something I love about travel is that people can really step up and help one another. It’s great to be reminded that we can’t survive alone, that we depend on each other to make it through life’s difficulties, and that we do step up and help one another.
As far as cash? The wifi in the hostel got fixed, I Skyped my bank, and all issues are now resolved. I didn’t have to devise an elaborate plan to hop a bus with my last 50 pesos to some other town in the middle of the night, get money from another town’s ATM, and hop back to Cafayete to pay people before they noticed I was gone. Whew. That would have been an inconvenient drag.
Besides the whole curse thing, Cafayete is wonderful. As one of the top two wine producing regions in Argentina, it carries a beautiful mood about it. The town square is picturesque and charming. The people mellow. The countryside is stunning with tall desert mountains in beautiful deep clay and green colors. The fields of grapevines curling around their posts and strings, clusters of ripe fruit hanging in the hot sun.
In Cafayete, I love that a very hearty pour of any restaurant’s or café’s house Malbec is $1.10 USD… and it’s good. I love that my hostel felt so comfortable, clean, and homey, with actual attention to décor, a great center patio where we all could gather and have a glass of wine or a cup of mate tea and talk about our days, and a well maintained kitchen for cooking.
I loved the areas around Cafayete for their incredible, heart expanding beauty and proud history and heritage. I loved the people I met at my hostel, all of whom were entertaining, funny, sweet, helpful, wry, interesting, or a combination of all those traits.
I loved the House of Empanadas, who served me the best empanadas I’ve had either in Brazil or Argentina.
Details, you ask? Happy to.
One day, I took a tour in the afternoon to visit the major landmarks of the Quebrada de Cafayete, the region I passed through on the bus trip from Salta to Cafayete but was pretty much too sick to actually appreciate. So let me preface this next part with a disclaimer. If you’re tired of hearing about how unbelievably beautiful the mountains are in Northern Argentina, stop reading now. OK, you’re still reading. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
It seems like, since I arrived in Argentina, the scope and scale of these mountains, their intensity in every way, have grown. The colors, the scale, the sheer force of them. First there was the Seven Colors Mountains in Humahuaca/Purmamarca. Then there was the next level, the Quebrada del Torro, with its height and its gauchos and its lonely beauty. And now Quebrada de Cafayete, with its tremendous scale, its rock formations so unique and unusual that they didn’t seem at all real, but maybe something out of an epic hero’s story or something on the far side of Mars. Rubies, rusts, oranges, pinks, clays, ochres… and also blues, violets, greens, and yellows. With their immensity so intense that the eyes just can’t see them, but flatten them out like a paint by numbers to just try and absorb them.
I saw these with Neil, who had just arrived at my hostel that day. Neil is a 31-year old freelance carpenter from Dublin, but living in Melbourne. A month ago, he was on a three day party streak in Melbourne and, while intoxicated during said three day streak:
· Decided that he had to travel to South America and figure out if he wanted to move there
· Logged onto a website, priced tickets and bought his one way plane ticket to Buenos Aires
· Packed and caught a taxi to the airport
· Rung up his Mum from the airport and told her he was leaving in an hour for South America and wasn’t sure when he was coming back
· Boarded the plane and immediately asked the flight attendant for a beer because he had “flight anxiety.” Sadly, he was turned down, the attendant saying that she couldn’t serve him until they took off. They took off, and he was served.
So Neil and I happened to be the only two people on this tour. There’s nothing like getting to know a crazy Dubliner over some of the most beautiful natural scenery in the world.
We stopped at several key formations and vista points to appreciate the rock formations the likes of which rival or surpass Monument Valley, Utah and the scale of which makes Monument Valley look like building blocks from a child’s toy box. We saw the sweeping playas and peaks, the mountains stretching back millions of years and looking ahead for millions more. The naturally-formed amphitheater, which was once a huge cave in the rock then was opened up by eons of rain and wind erosion. In this amphitheater, Cafayete has an annual music festival to take advantage of the incredible acoustics this naturally-formed amphitheater provides. I wish I could explain the scale of this formation. My pictures, for the most part, don’t capture it. Except for one. In this picture, you see the layers of compressed minerals and rock in beautiful arching and swaying patterns. And then, at the lower right center of the picture, you see a tiny speck. That’s Neil. That’s the scale we’re talking about.
We also visited the Devil’s Throat, another incredible formation equally massive and equally as impressive and awe-inspiring as the amphitheater. Here, I kicked in my rock climbing skills and scaled some short and easy faces to crawl inside the Devil’s Throat. The colors, the patterns, the scale. I felt dumbstruck.
These places throw me into simultaneous states of awe and confusion. As I marvel at them and am rendered speechless by their ancientness and immensity, I also think of how we humans have this odd tendency to think the world revolves around us. When in reality, the world is more ancient and more powerful than we could ever comprehend. It will live on millions of years past any memory of our species and will continue to be part of the grand scheme as it came into being at the beginning of time. And even how ideas like time, when used with these places, are simply weak constructs that humans have created to try and classify and understand and place and compare ourselves next to them.
That’s what these places, this excruciating beauty and immensity, are doing with me. I’m properly put in my place and get a tiny glimpse into the immensity and wide open infiniteness of space and time and mass and energy and spirit and physics and math and art, which are flimsy expressions of something nameless, unspeakable, limitless. Something unclassifiable and indescribable. Something infinitely beyond anything we can ever grasp. And that’s right and perfect.
But I digress.
While in Cafayete, I also visited the ruins of Quilmes. I took this tour, about an hour outside Cafayete, with Guillaume from Nice, who had also arrived the same day as Neil. His dry French sense of humor and vow each day that he was going to quit smoking today (“no really, today for sure, I just want to finish this pack…”) prompted me poke him in the ribs with a wry smile. Dating about 1000 AD, Quilmes was a complex indigenous urban settlement that occupied about 30 hectares and was home to about 5000 inhabitants. These people survived contact with the Inca, which occurred from about 1480 on, but sadly, they couldn’t withstand the onslaught of the Spaniards who in 1667 deported the last 2000 inhabitants to Buenos Aires. The site itself is impressive. Though no building still stands, a good percentage of the foundations of the site have been excavated. The foundations start at the base of a large hill and crawl up the hill in steps. I hiked up the treacherous hill to see the community layed out before me, making geometric patterns in the hillside.
When I arrived on the site, I was given a brochure in “Spanglish” explaining the story behind Quilmes. But fundamentally, what the brochure really was was an angry tirade against the invaders who broke apart the Quilmes community, which was rich with culture, heritage, history, and indigenous identity. It spoke of never allowing this type of invasion to happen again and called out to readers to vehemently support the preservation of indigenous people and Pachamama (translation: Mother Earth). It also called for things like restitution and reclamation of the tribal lands. In short, Quilmes is a symbol of all the genocide and destruction that non-native people have brought to Argentina and how change must occur to preserve these indigenous cultures.
I’m often struck by how the history of colonialism the world over is so bloody and horrible. And how it’s still occurring today under the auspices of “spreading democracy and promoting a free-market economy.” Sigh.
I also mountain biked while in Cafayete. I wanted to head up to the path that would take me to the falls at the Rio Colorado. I came across a rattlesnake on my way. Yes, another snake. I didn’t see it, but I definitely heard it. I was walking my bike past a cluster of low rocks and I heard a rattle. As I got closer, it sped up, and as I passed by and went on my way, it slowed and stopped. And the funny thing was, I didn’t even realize what it was until later. Oops. I should know better being from Oregon and California. This is snake story #3, just for the record.
Also, on my mountain bike ride, I had the chance to ride past several beautiful fields of grapevines and wineries (and did some tastings, of course). It was quite picturesque, with the green vines and dusty earth set against the tall blue-green mountains.
When all is said and done, despite the travel challenges I faced, I come away from Cafayete loving its beauty and uniqueness.
I guess, then, that Cafayete isn’t cursed at all. It’s blessed.
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