Salta II - Quebrada de Humahuaca

After the 14 hour epic excursion to the altiplano Saturday, Sunday was a much needed sleep-in (relative term after 4am bedtime and 10am start) and rest day. Sundays are taken pretty seriously in this part of the world, and pretty much everything of note bar a few restaurants was closed for the day. Thankfully an exception was made for Salta's premier museum, the Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña (MAAM). MAAM is most famous for the Llullaillaco children, young Incans sacrificed to the mountain gods 500 years ago and discovered by a combined mountaineering/archaeological team in the 90s.

It's one thing to read about child-sacrifice but quite another to see the amazingly preserved (they were left at 6730M of altitude) bodies and above all faces of little kids, faces you could also see today in the surrounding town. My friend Brendan wrote of the impact stories of Incan child sacrifice had from the perspective of a father of two school-aged girls, also noting some of the more recent (if less physically violent) cruelty the church inflicted on young girls and their families. The impact is no less on a father-of-none ! Easily the best museum of the trip - notwithstanding the triple-priced entry ticket for non-Argentineans (grrrrr).

Monday morning was another 7am start for the second epic mini-bus tour of the area around Salta. The make up of this group was quite different from that of the Saturday tour - apart from an Irish couple, everyone else on the bus was Argentinian, all of them (apart from Salteño Fernando the guide) from Buenos Aires. I took advantage to tune my ear to the peculiar dialect spoken by Porteños and shamefully kept my nationality (and supposed proficiency in the English language) hidden from the Irish pair until quite late in the trip !

Monday's Bus is full of locals ...

The highlight of this tour was visiting the famous Quebrada de Humahuaca, a UNESCO heritage listed gorge running about 100 km from the town of San Salvador de Jujuy (itself 2 hours north of Salta) to the eponymous Humahuaca. First stop was the little market town of Purmamarca, the last stop on Saturday's tour. The light was a little better this time, showing off the towns famous backdrop, the Cerro de los Siete Colores:

Seven Colour Hill

The gorge (Quebrada) is famous for multi-coloured mountains and picturesque villages, and didn't disappoint on either count. Unfortunately though stops were in towns rather than on the roadside so photography was mostly of the through the bus window variety:




Lunch was in the village itself, where it appears a deal has been established to have tours conducted by local males. As we approached the bus was waved down and a local lad hoppped in and introduced himself to our guide - and the rest of us. You can guess which one he is in the photo below:


The town itself is a pleasant combination of colonial architecture and adobe streets - with a super-tacky memorial to the indigenous people (the vast majority of the population up here) dominating the main square.

Momumento a la Independencia

Humahuaca Markets

Remains of Iglesia Santa Barbara - destroyed for the monument

The 'up yours' cactus

Ancient Incan Photography Company

At the Artists Palette

After brief stop for the tiny but pretty one church town of Uquia, the bus, by popular vote, deviated from the planned Jujuy town tour and expressway home, opting instead for the picturesque single lane (but two way) jungle mountain road back to Salta.


As always, a few more photos from Salta, including many more bus-window snaps of the colourful gorge and mountains, are here.

Stacks of photos from Mexican Bus Windows

I store my photos on the website Fotki. I can't remember now how I found it, but at the time (2001) it was far away the best (and most reasonable) of the photo websites around. Today I have more than 5000 photos there so I won't be changing any time soon. I actually prefer its interface to Flickr, and the multi-album facility to that of Picasa. Picasa wins with its desktop software you use to synchronise albums, which unfortunately is not available on the Mac. It also has a cleaner interface, but is not as well suited to storing large numbers as fotki is. One day I will spend more time doing a more rigorous comparison.

Fotki has come out with a new feature called widgets, which give you ways of emdedding collections of your photos on websites (such as blogs). There are 3 at the moment, and I'm using this entry to test out the Stack feature, which represents a fotki album as a stack of prints with an intuitive flickability to browse the album.

This stack comes from my album Mexico from the Bus Window which is fairly self explanatory. You'll notice that one of my busses has wings. If you find the little arrow icon on a given photo, it will take you back to that photo in fotki. You can also vary the size of the stack, and set the background to any colour you want. You can see a stack of my photos from Palenque, Mitlan and Mont Alban below.

Next post I'll test out the badge and slideshow (yawn) widgets.

Mexican Wrap

Generally, western travellers in Mexico, even those on a budget, take the first class busses to get from A to B. The reason for this became clear to me as I took my first second class bus (if that makes sense) Friday out to the village of Piste, which is town that is used base to visit the ruins of Chichen Itza, the most famous ruins in Mexico, and probably the best - although I personally preferred Palenque, for its 'romantic' jungle setting, and more practically, for the shade that the jungle provided !

Anyway, the first class bus from Merida to Piste takes 1.5 hours, the second class one 2.5 hours. It soon became clear why, as 10 minutes after we took off from Merida, we stopped - in Merida still. This was the pattern for the rest of the trip, in every village we passed we stopped at least once, and normally twice, and locals would struggle on with all sorts of things (no chickens yet though) and then struggle off again at the other end of the village. In addition street vendors would regularly wave the bus down, come on board with trays of cakes, ice-creams, fruit or whatever they had, walk up and down the corridor, and then wander off ! The upside is that you get a real chance to see the villages, and gardens as you pass them, especially as the bus had to slow down almost to a complete halt before what must be the world's most vicious speed humps. I took very few photos, as I was sitting next to the people who lived in these places and felt a little self-conscious.

Surreptitious Bus Window Shot

These busses are also 'speed limited' by virtue of a red light and buzzer that come on if the driver exceeds 95. Travelling between towns, you get used to the pattern of waking to a beep, flashing lights and then a surge as the driver takes his foot off the accelarator, then puts it down again to repeat 40 seconds later ... very peaceful !

At Piste we were surrounded by a horde of kids, trying to shepherd us to a local 'posada' (somewhere not quite classy enough to be a hotel, which given what I've experience so far here in Mexico is fair warning). Obviously if the guys needed kids to round up suspects, the place was pretty dodgy, but as the other place in town that might have been an option was at the other end of town and hidden, we relented and went to the Hotel Posada Maya.

The owner showed us to our cells, and we were too tired to argue or look for others (we had slept the previous night on busses) so we accepted. The only other guests in the venue (the Texan documentary makers from the Chichen Itza post) said they had seen three other places in town that were more expensive and worse, so i guess we weren't too badly off. The perils of a tourist trap !

Not the worst accomodation in Piste, apparently

Our host, short, fat and topless, returned to his hammock, rolled up newspaper in hand, where he was watching a discovery channel documentary on mosquitoes. It reminded me of the Leunig cartoon with the parent and child admiring a beautiful nature scene on their television, while outside, visible through the window in the room, is exactly the same scene. This guy (thwack) whacked himself every 30 seconds to get rid of some of the swarm of mosquitoes around him (thwack) as he watched intently more mosquitoes on the box. I was glad of my malaria tablets and spray - miraculously i haven't been bitten yet (no Mexico tummy either). *

My cell had been recently sprayed, but the shower was ventilated with a hole in the roof (covered by a slab of concrete supported by bricks) which was a fairly inviting entry for our buzzing friends. Anyway, i was exhausted and managed to sleep reasonably well until 6am wake up - again to avoid the ruins heat.

There are, of course, many more tales to tell, but it's getting late and time for dinner, so you'll have to wait until the slide show(s) on my return.

Mexico has been a tiring but fascinating experience. I knew I was in for a bit of a rushed trip, in order to get to Cuba in time and that turned out to be the case, but only as much as many other travellers. I saw as much as I expected, and everything that I really wanted except some of the villages around San Cristobal, but the early departure from there gave me today's rest day which will be used as preparation for Cuba.

So thanks for getting this far, and you'll hear more from me hopefully some time (internet cafes permitting) in the middle of my Cuba trip.

* One of my Danish friends ended up contracting Dengue fever - we suspect from here.

San Cristobal to Merida

Amazingly enough, my travel diary is all but up to date ... 10 pages now. One of the advantages of travelling alone is that you actually get time for recording your experiences. I'll extract some 'highlights' for you - until my hands get tired, or my credit at the cafe runs out !

Merida Doorway

I am now in Merida (same place as the previous post). I arrived here on Friday morning after an overnight bus trip from Palenque. This the bus trip with the worst reputation in Mexico, and i was hoping to share it with two Danish friends I'd met on my previous bus trip, for safety in numbers. It wasn't to be, so I waited for a couple of hours until they turned up on the later bus.

My first impressions of Merida were very negative ... Lonely Planet's charming colonial town was a dirty noisy crowded crumbling dump with very narrow and crowded footpaths, speeding busses and very aggressive street vendors who can spot a tourist from a hundred miles (and let's face it, two Danes and i weren't going to fool anyone, even without our backpacks).

So we did brekky, had a wander and went into the only shop that didn't physically try and manhandle us in, as the girls wanted to buy some of the hammocks that this town is famous for. This was the scene of my negotiating skills, after the guy gave us his final, already given you a big deal blah blah blah offer of 1800 pesos for the package', i offered 850 (the girls were willing to pay 1500) and wouldn't budge - bingo !

Merida is a few hours from the beach resorts (notably Cancun) and used to get many Americans, who have stopped coming since September 11, hence the over aggressiveness of the vendors. My opinion of the town has improved drastically today (Sunday) - the streets were closed to traffic, there are people everywhere in the main square, free concerts and even the vendors seem to have taken the day off (as i have, from travelling - two nights in the same bed for the first time in more than a week !). So come here on a Sunday if you plan to at all !

My favourite town remains Oaxaca, from where I last wrote. The pictures below might give you an idea of the feel of the town:

Oaxaca Kids

Miscelanea

I've posted some more photos here for your enjoyment.

That night I visited the museum, then saw a free concert of traditional Indian musicians from the various tribes of the area, dressed traditionally. The next day I took a tour to visit three places: El Tule, famous for its big tree (!), Tlacalula, famous for Sunday markets, and Mitla (main destination for me) for its ruins of a Zapotec temple and mausoleum.

Big Tree at Tule

Chooks at Tlacolula Markets

Stairs at Mitla

I'm not a big fan of organised tours but this was the only way to see all three places in a single day. Our guide was useless, and tried to divert the tour to another market town that sold carpets, and then rushed us through the ruins with a very basic guide that covered half of what Lonely Planet had to say ! Still, good ruins, and I got to meet Philippe and Cyriana, a Belgian couple with whom i ended up travelling for the next few days.

Next stop was San Cristobal, a colonial town, also a student town and the capital of Chiapas state that was briefly occupied by the Zapatistas 8 years ago. We arrived at 7 in the morning after my first overnight bus trip and found a place to stay, but the rooms weren't ready until after lunch so we had a nice morning wandering around in smelly travelled-in day old clothes, until we could finally shower and we took the opportunity to have a siesta.

That night we went out for dinner and found a great bar 'El Revolucion' with live music and a driendly vibe. Cyriana eventually went home (she's expecting in 4 months) and Philippe and I stayed out for a few more bevvies and songs.

That was our mistake ...