Wednesday, October 12, 2011

A Pinch of Salta, a Taste of Jujuy

Llama sighting in Jujuy
From the hot and gritty city of San Miguel de Tucuman, we took the four-hour bus ride north to the city of Salta. The difference between the two regional capitals was immediately apparent: where Tucuman is loud, brash and modernish (in a distinctly funky way), Salta is more sedate, a charming, low-rise colonial town with colorful attractive architecture. Our headquarters was a quaint B&B called Bloomers (I wish my mom was around to have a laugh at that one!) - several nice rooms set around a lovely courtyard hidden behind a lavender streetfront. We were just a short stroll from Salta's plaza and famous churches: the "pink one" and the "red one".

Jen had a presentation scheduled the evening we arrived, after which she taped a TV interview with a local journalist. Her skill in handling this impromptu interview in Spanish was awesome. I knew she was good, but not that good! They're supposed to send us the DVD someday. Anyway, afterwards we went out to dinner with some nice folks, including a gal from New York City who has been living in Salta since 1962. Her husband and children are Argentine, but she sounds like she's straight off the streets of the Big Apple. Needless to say, she had some good stories to tell!
Street art in Salta

For the next three days, we were simple tourists. We windowshopped around the plaza, ate lunch in dive restaurants , hunted down artisan markets, took a cable car ride to the top of the mountain, had dinner in an old mansion where folclorico singers sit at tables belting out tunes, and went to museums. The centerpiece of Salta tourism is the new museum built to store and display the remains of three mummified children who were extracted from a ritual gravesite in the nearby Andes at 22,000 feet. A boy and a girl of about six or seven, along with a teenage girl, were buried alive in a religious ceremony carried out by Inca priests some 600 years ago. The unique conditions on top of the mountain preserved the mummies almost perfectly. Only one mummy is displayed at a time, so we got to see the teenager, sitting in her glass case, preserved under low lights and freezing temperatures. It was really spooky to see her and imagine she was just sleeping (for 600 years). A soundtrack of mournful Andean pan-pipes played incessantly throughout our visit, leading to associations (panpipes = buried alive) I'll never be able to shake.

From Salta, it was back on the bus up to Jujuy (hoo-HOOEY) province, which looks startlingly like New Mexico and Arizona in parts. Jen first had a presentation to give in the small, hot and sleepy town of San Pedro; from there we were free to be tourists for the rest of the trip. We went up into the mountains, following the famous Quebrada de Humahuaca, to the town of Tilcara where we chilled for a couple of days. Tilcara is a scenic and dusty riverside village made mostly of adobe brick. It's somewhat of a hipster hangout nowadays, although most locals carry on their business as usual. The local cactus, the cardones, are almost identical to the saguaro of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, and the hills in the Quebrada seem lifted straight out of Northern New Mexico, especially the Cerro de Siete Colores in the village of Purmamarca. We took a ton of photos, ate a lot of empanadas (and dust), and generally had a great time soaking up the atmosphere and scenery. As much as we enjoy Buenos Aires, it was fantastic to get out of the big city and enjoy some of the best that provincial Argentina has to offer.

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