Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The ironic thing about blogs

is that when you´re in the middle of the action, it´s the very hardest to keep up. Here I am in El Chalten, Argentina, having hiked 46 kilometers in the past 48 hours and about to walk on a glacier in the morning, heading after that to the end of the world on a 13 hour bus ride that will seem like nothing compared to the 30-hour one I completed Monday morning, and I CAN´T WRITE ANYTHING or upload any photos because there´s a line three-deep to use this slow, sticky hostel computer. If you´re wondering, El Chalten, Argentina is absolutely enchanting and hiking to a summet paralleling FitzRoy is so so hard. El Calafate has yet to win my heart (as all I´ve done here so far is spend money on excursions and bus tickets), but I think the trip to Perito Moreno Glacier tomorrow will more than make up for that... expect a new profile photo as soon as I get back to BsAs (for only three days, before I move to the RdJ, BR! but that´s for another post).

The point of this all, dear reader, is that Patagonia is bomb, and when I have so much time and free internet access to recount everything that´s happened I will prove why having a blog is worth it. PROMISE. So stay tuned; it´s gonna get GOOD.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Salta III, or The Grossest Meal of my Life

We woke up on our second morning in Tilcara with the best of intentions: head back to Salta to return our rental car, grab an American brunch in Jujuy half-way, and move south to Cafayate. Turns out Lonely Planet's definition of "American-style brunch restaurant" meant that along with medialunas and cafe con leche, you could also get eggs. (Guys, I am dying for some waffles.) Anyway, as we reached Salta/the valley the rains began. And did not stop. We decided, ultimately, to try heading to Cafayate anyway, but as a bus would be the same price as our rental car but with far less autonomy, to keep the affectionately-nicknamed Pepe Raul Lolita Thundercloud White Power Wagon for another day, return it Sunday at 7pm, and hop on a bus home Sunday night. The problem we didn't forsee was the severity of the rain in Salta. Our trip soon became XTREME CAFAYATE 2K10.

If I had to sum up in one cliche the weather in this country it would be this: when it rains, it pours. If I had to extrapolate, I would add that the drainage systems here are terrible. This is true even in Buenos Aires, where two weeks ago a nice man to whom I was giving a private lesson offered to drive me home when the sky turned purple and alarming amounts of water began to pound at the windows. He had to turn the car around twice because the puddles were so high that they had the potential to flood his engine.

WELL let me tell you who's not a pansy about driving through puddles up to the door handles. US, in our rental car. Well, eventually, that is: about 30 kilometres outside of Salta, we saw a line of cars stopped ahead of us in the road and a brave soul forging a puddle that was definitely up to its bumper, if not higher. We watched a few small cars (as well as the much rarer large truck or bus) cross the ridiculous mud-brown puddle, and far, far more turn around or park their car to wait for a better time / take an alternate route. After 15 minutes of should we/shouldn't we, we turned the car around and decided to wait/eat/withdraw money in the first town we encountered.
Walking around Cerillos, pop. 236 was an adventure in itself, as raging streams of water made crossing from street to sidewalk / sidewalk to street absolutely impossible. After twenty minutes, we found a hole-in-the-wall (no literally, keep reading) and stepped inside, only to find each table dirty and COVERED in flies. Old men sat at two of the tables, staring at a futbol match on tv. The old men were also covered in flies. It was like a horror film. As we backed slowly out, Matt commented, "Well, that was... local." Fifteen more minutes of walking / strenuously hopping across puddles got us to another restaurant, this one with fewer old men but probably just as many flies. When we asked the waiter to see a menu, he told us: "We don't have one."
-- "What do you have to eat then?"
-- "Asado."
-- "With which types of meat?"
-- "Eh, just asado. And fries."
Waiter returned with a large communal plate of fatty, uncuttable mystery meats, on which the hoardes of flies promptly took the opportunity to land and poop and land and poop.

At that moment losing all desire to be stranded further in Cerrilos, we made the decision to GO HARD rather than GO HOME, walked back to the car, and drove through the puddle, praying so hard that Pepe-Raul-Tito-Lola-White-whatever's engine would not flood. The feeling of water swishing under my feet while seated in the car is one I will forever associate with Northern Argentina. GOING HARD was worth it: we made it through the puddle (and six or seven more just as big or bigger) before we were in the clear and climbing out of the valley.

Beautiful Cerrilos, Argentina.

Stranded in the street -- it was a matter of eventually realizing your feet were just going to get drenched anyway and having fun trying to jump while also accepting this fact.

Action shot: this is mid-forge when we could feel the water under our feet and were praying that the engine wouldn't get flooded.

Sure enough, as we climbed, the rain stopped and it even became sunny as we entered Cafayete. The Quedabra de Cafayate was entirely worth the previous stress/drenching -- as the Lonely Planet oh-so-over-eloquently reads we were able to experience:
Gashes in the rock wall [that] let you enter and appreciate the tortured stone whose clearly visible layers have been twisted by tectonic upheavals into unimaginable configurations.
TORTURED STONE
UNIMAGINABLE CONFIGURATIONS
PULITZER-WORTHY WRITING

In other words, the valley was full of striated red rock formations shaped vaguely like things and thus given appropriate designations (The Windows, The Toad, the Cross, etc.). You could climb into them and it was incredibly awesome. See below.

Garganta del Diablo (Devil's Throat)

Elizabeth and Kat are obviously far more baller than I.

El Amphiteatro (the Ampitheater)

This is not a formation, but doesn't it look like the Land Before Time?

The town itself was very nice, and we got an excellent dinner to make up for the Worst Lunch. Cafayate is famous for Torrontes wine (which is stellar, perhaps my new favorite kind) and for wine-flavored ice cream, which burns the tongue just a bit and actually got us all slightly tipsy. We spent the night relaxing outside and the next day returning our brave lil' car back to (still rainy) Salta.

Torrontes ice cream

After 22 hours on a bus, we were back in Buenos Aires, and after four and a half weeks, I finally finished this blog post. Wu-juy.