BUENOS AIRES REDUX

Well, we're back in Buenos Aires to close our trip. Today, a few images I didn't get into the earlier posts: a couple of cool buildings, and a few tourist cliches such as the obelisk above. I don't get why every city thinks it has to have one, and why every city says theirs is the biggest. Hmm... don't think I'll go there.

One thing do like to see, though, are national art galleries. The one in Buenos Aires is fantastic. While the first floor is second-rate paintings by major world artists, the second floor devoted to Argentinian art is amazing. A lot of social comment in the realistic works. I remember especially a terrific piece from the 19th century: a man, woman and nursing child sit at their empty table and watch workers going off to the mine. I think its English title would read "No Job, No Food". Anyway, here's the gallery -- and just five minutes from our hotel.



Politics is ever-present. the grandmothers, mothers and wives of the disappeared continue to press for justice outside the presidential palace, as do soldiers from the Maldives/Faulklands war.



The economy ravages once grand buildings:



But there are still plenty of stunners:





Here, by the way, is The Haunted Tower. It's in the La Boca area. I've searched everywhere to find out why it's haunted. In my fractured Spanish I think I heard a local hairdresser tell me there was an actress who killed herself (or her aunt) there in the twenties. Anybody out there know the true story?



And, of course, ghosts brings me back to Recoleta cemetery and a cool tomb that missed my first entry:



Last shot today is from the land of the living, specifically Tigre, a suburb on accessible only by water. Indeed most of the homes are on individual islands too.



Tomorrow, I'm going to end the Argentina series with shots of the Botanical Gardens and national zoo. Then It's back to Canada and a few posts on writing as I get ready for the launch of my new novel, BORDERLINE!

Till then,

Allan

ARGENTINA: A LITTLE SALT WITH YOUR FRIES?

Yup, you're looking at a heckuva lot of salt. This salt plain is en route to the Humahuaca gorge and the famous Seven-Colored mountain. It goes as far in all directions and is twelve feet deep. The miners who carve the blocks straight down are on a day off. So, aside from salt shakers, where does all this stuff go?

Into bricks. That's right. Salt bricks. Up close, they look like this:



"What would you use salt bricks for?" I hear you say. "I mean, you can't built anything out of salt." Think again. Except for the roof, an entirely salt-brick building:



As you might guess, it's a little lonely in these parts. This is the diner in the biggest town around.



And these are the local llamas. The farmers put ribbons in their coats to tell which herds they belong to.



And this is a dog chasing the 4 x 4 after 30 seconds. We were clocking 60 mph!



Say, did I mention it might get lonely around here? Take a look at the home down there. Maybe this is why ghosts and visions feature so heavily in Argentinian fiction.



I must say, this would make a nice writer's retreat, though.



BTW, as mentioned in an earlier post, Daniel and I absolutely loved our driver/guide Pablo. On ten-hour drives it´s nice to have a guide who -- in addition to having encyclopedic knowledge -- can carry on conversations about pop culture, the relative merits of various bidets, and what to do when you´re caught on a tour in the desert without toilet paper. ("I have gone through so many socks!")

Tomorrow, he takes us to the most colourful mountains you have ever seen!

Till then,

Allan

CACHI -- PLUS A PRE-INCAN CIVILIZATION

Cachi is a very small and very beautiful colonial town about a five hour drive from anywhere, aka Salta. It's in the pocket between two sets of mountains, so that despite how arid everything is around it, it's actually quite lush from the underground water that pools from the surrounding mountains. This shot is taken from the town cemetery, the highest point in the area. The custom of burying the dead on mountain peaks comes from both Incan and pre-Incan civiliations.

The main building in Cachi is the town square. Simple and stark, and quite beautiful for that.



Inside the white building is a museum with an open-air courtyard containing a series of rocks with pre-Incan carvings.



We had lunch away from the tour buses at an EXCELLENT restaurant up the street from the town square. It's called Platos y Diseño and I highly recommend it. After that, Pablo got us back to Salta for an evening walk, then picked us up early the next morning for a drive to the Humahuaca Gorge -- one of the most stunning days of our trip. From rock carving we got to see the layout of a pre-Incan town of several thousand people. When the Inca arrived, the earlier people simply left. The foundations are all made of granite boulders; as you can imagine, they've stayed exactly where the first people put them.







BTW, in Salta there's a museum containing the mummified bodies of three children sacrificed by the Inca. They weren't selected from the poor and thrown in wells to drown, as the Aztec priests did in their sacrifices. (Nor were their still-beating hearts removed.) Instead, they came from royal families throughout the region and were "wedded" symbolically at a regional ceremony before being brought back to their villages where they were frozen at the tops of mountains. (Boys as well as girls, in an early and rare example of gender equity.) The priests gave the children corn booze and, when they were passed out, put them in stone holes and let them freeze to death. Apparently the bodies were found with their muscles relaxed, so the deaths were painless. (I´ll bet they found that such a relief.) The point was to bond various clans together. It's believed there are hundreds and hundreds bodies in these stone graves, preserved by the freezing mountaintop air. May they rest in peace.

I leave you with a shot of the rugged landscape.



Tomorrow, the amazing salt plains, llamas, and farms who really want to get away from the crowd.

Cheers,

Allan

PAGING DR. FREUD!

Mixed in with the mountains in the Cachi gorge are stretches of cactus plains.



Careful where you sit!



Pablo also took us on walks through the rugged countryside.



And into cattle canyons.



But the real point of this post is to show you the fun we had driving. Remember how I told you that drivers here are crazy? I mean outside Buenos Aires, even cities like Salta with oiver 600,000 people have almost no stop lights or stop signs. Cars race up to an intersection. If there's a hole in the traffic flow they floor it. Otherwise -- AAA!!! As a pedestrian, it feels like being in a carnival game of Whack-A-Mole where you're the mole!

Same craziness here in the mountains. A single dotted line means, feel free to drive on the wrong side of the road -- in fact, we insist! A double solid line when approaching a hairpin turn where you can't see what's ahead means, "Hey, it's up to you, bro." On the few occasions Argentinians are serious, they actually paint huge exclamation marks in the lanes, and then it's kinda like, "Don't say we didn't warn you!"

Here Pablo shows us the happy-go-lucky driving spirit that makes traveling here so much fun.

1) Talk to passengers in the backseat to make sure they're happy. Use your hands to make your points.



2) At curves, take your eyes off the road and flash a smile out the window at pretty girls hitchhiking. Or just check yourself out in the side mirror.



3) As you sail through the air over the cliff, reassure the screaming passengers in the back seat.



4) Leap before the crash and have lunch ready for when your passengers climb back to the road. (If they're kinda dead, make them a nice stone marker. Flowers optional.)



Next stop Cachi, salt flats, and pre-Incan settlements!

Till then,

Allan

ARGENTINA: INTO THE CACHI GORGE!

So far we'd been traveling on our own. But our excellent travel agent, Pablo Kesselman of Carlson-Wagonlit/Clarke-Way Travel -- who's originally from Buenos Aires and whose life story would make a great novel -- hooked us up with a company called Argentina Activa for our mountain trek. And they in turn hooked us up with Pablo Sancho Perez, who in addition to being funny and insightful was actually able to drive the treacherous hairpins without getting us killed. We went in a 4 x 4 -- just us, so no tour stops in junky souvenir places!

The mountains are the Eastern rage, just east of the Andes and reach almost as high -- 4,600 meters above sea level: we started at 2,000 meters.



After every other hairpin turn there is a stone memorial with a cross for each car that´s plunged over.

Pablo says some (like a bus with 40 passengers) have had bad brakes. Here he shows Daniel the memorial to the tragedy --



Others have run-ins with stray bulls -- note the missing guard rail.



But most accidents happen when locals simply fall asleep at the wheel. One blink and it´s yippee-ai-o-kay-ay!

We passed a small chapel used by locals. A lot of cigarettes lit and left to burn down as burnt offerings. (Here as in Afro-Latina religions like voodoo and santeria, gifts of tobacco to Mother Earth are common, and the clever Jesuits allowed the local Incas to synchretize their religions with Catholicism. Those traditions still strong.





(FYI: The theory is that Incas and previous waves of indigenous peoples came across the Bering Sea and moved south -- i.e., that they are directly related to our Inuit. Indeed the resemblance to the facial bone structures of the people here are striking.)



Oh, above is another example of local tradition. The cross behind me isn't for a dead person. It marks a cache. Travelers on the mountain trails leave things they don't need and take things other travelers have left behind. The Incan and pre-Incan peoples created the piles. the Spaniards added the crosses.

And Pablo told us of another old tradition to do with funerals. It still goes on in rural areas where they have wakes like the Irish. (No embalming but they wait a day before burial to make sure you´re really dead. Kinda thoughtful.) Anyway, the cool thing is ¨the weepers¨-- old women in the community who make sure things don´t get too glum or out of control. So when the drinking leads to boisterous behaviour they start beat their chests and wailing, then if things are too serious they crack jokes and pass out the booze.

We interrupt this text to bring you a few photos:





We pass giant sculptures of garishly painted 14 foot crucified Christs at the entrance to various villages. The limbs are extended like an El Greco preying mantis; the paint makeup looks like the Joker. Truly nightmarish. But time to sign off. Next post I'll show you Pablo "Look Ma No Hans" Sancho Perez and his fun approach to hairpin turns.

Hasta luego,

Allan

SALTA, ARGENTINA!

Iguazu Falls was exciting, but not as exciting as the evening taxi ride from the Salta airport to our B&B. There are three speeds in Argentina: "AAA!", "AAAAAAA!", and "HOLY F***ING AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!" Argentinians drive like Parisiens with blindfolds. Especially fun is passing three cars and a bus while going up a hill. Naturally I'm delighted. Since getting home, Daniel has found my driving positively rational.

Salta is an astonishingly beautiful colonial city, the capital of Salta province in the north west. The province is a plateau between two mountain ranges, one being the Eastern range before the Andes. There are 600,000 people but all the buildings are low. There is a gorgeous central square dominated by the cathedral which is painted pink-lavendar. At night all the colonial buildings are lit up which makes the whole place look like a bunch of fancy wedding cakes. Exhibit A at the top of this post. Exhibit B here:



Here, by the way, are those cathedrals by day:





(I'd love to see Pope Benedict do mass in a pink cathedral, wouldn't you?)

BTW, the central statue in the park is of General Guemes, the northern hero of the War of Independence against Spain in the 19th century.



Salta was founded by a guy called Lerma who was about to be thrown in jail in Spain, but his well-to-do family managed to get him exiled here instead. Eventually the locals kicked him back home for being a totally major jerk -- but he still rates a statue by the town hall. Both statue and town hall are seen behind Daniel.



If memory serves, the town hall was on Avenido Belgrano, named for another war hero. In any event it was on route to a terrific artsy area by the old train station. Unlike the flea market in San Telmo in Buenos Aires, the craft booths here had really high quality workmanship. And the restaurants! OMG!



Speaking of restaurants, it is so hard to eat healthy in Argentina. For breakfasts, our B&B, Bloomers -- a place the guide books might call 'quirky' and 'charming' -- served dolce de leche (caramel) pancakes, and croissants with candied squash jam. Lunch at a neighborhood restaurant was an empanada and a provelta. The provelta was billed as an appetizer. What it was was a half pound of grilled, spiced provolone which they offered to drench in olive oil. Yesterday for dessert we had that squash jam under a slab of goat cheese. And then of course there are all the local ice creams which are, well.. necessary in order to experience the region.

One other fun thing we did was go up a cable car to the top of the main mountain in town. Here's the shadow of our car against the mountain.



And here's a long-distance view of a suburb of Salta.



And here's a shot I took it from behind a man-made waterfall in the summit gardens looking out through the water.



I promised I'd introduce Pablo today, the hilarious driver/guide who took us through some hair-raising experiences in the most gorgeous mountains you've ever seen. (All different colours, and some almost 5,000 metres above sea level!) You'll also see salt flats, miles of giant cactus, llamas, farms in the middle of nowhere, herds of cows in canyons. But, hey, I'm tired. Tune in to the next few posts and we'll be out in a 4 x 4! I promise, you won't be disappointed!

Till then,

Allan