We’d spent a lot of time at the bottom of South America and it was time to move on. Two flights took us over 3,000 km, from the far south of Argentina to the north. The first delivered us to Argentina’s second-largest city, Cordoba, population 2 million. What a pleasant place. Several of the tree-lined inner city streets are pedestrianized, and Cordoba also has several universities including one in the city centre itself, all this making for a bustling, youthful vibe. It also has some beautifully preserved Spanish-era buildings including an impressive cathedral.
We’d hired an airbnb apartment for a week, a 20 minute walk from the city centre, and we proceeded to become reacquainted with city life after weeks of communing with mountains and ice. We attended to some housekeeping chores – Leetuan had her glasses fixed, we all had haircuts, and I spent a day in an internet café finishing some work-related commitments. My own little netbook was squashed during a recent bus journey; the screen was cracked and the visible display area reduced to the size of a cigarette box - the rest is unhelpful blackness. In Cordoba we also saw Leonardo’s latest movie The Revenant; it brought back memories of our Torres del Paine hike.
The second flight took us a further 1,000 km north, to the smaller city of Salta, population 600,000, in the far north of Argentina. We liked Salta very much. It’s a leafy laid back place with many fine Spanish era buildings and churches too, particularly those lining the town square Plaza de 9 Julio. Salta has some interesting museums including the fabulous Museum of High Altitude Archeology. The Salta region of northern Argentina was the southern extremity of the Inca civilization of centuries ago. In the 1990s, near the top of a 20,000+ foot extinct volcano to the west of here, archeologists unearthed the almost perfectly preserved bodies of two children and a young woman sacrificed by the Incas to their gods more than 500 years ago. Still clothed as they were when buried in a sitting position after being thoroughly stupefied with maize liquor (there was no harsh violence involved in their deaths; apparently it was a huge honour to be chosen to leave the earth in this manner), the bodies are now displayed in this museum in Salta. Understood in the context of the Inca times, which the museum does an excellent job of explaining, the story is far more fascinating than confronting.
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We made a couple of day trips from Salta to visit two smaller villages in the surrounding countryside. The most memorable turned out to be our Sunday visit to La Caldera. It was hosting the Argentinian equivalent of a rodeo with wild horses, not bulls, providing the excitement. The gauchos were out in their best gear; they took it very seriously and cared not just for their own appearance but equally for that of their horses and tools of trade. Everything was arranged neatly and made pleasing to the eye. It was certainly a level more sophisticated than Australian rodeos; almost an art form.
After a filling lunch of chunky beef ribs washed down with a bottle of Cafayate Malbec we made our way to the grassy field where the action was about to begin. Like horse racing callers, the commentators provided high speed description of the on-field action, but here also to the accompaniment of sustained gaucho guitar & vocal music. It was a fascinating, sometimes exciting, day.
Gaucho couture:
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