9/19 and 9/20 -- Tilcara, Argentina

The mountains were wrinkled and modest around Tilcara, and the buildings were single-storied and cracked earthtones. The sidewalks often rose several feet above the ground -- steady and level, as the dirt road beneath it dipped and twisted -- and it could make a Quechan baby girl and her pre-pubescent brother the same height. Perfect for walking lessons. I found myself tripping over edges and missing sections of pavement here, as I did in Buenos Aires and as I will do when I burrow my way through Chile and into Peru. In this place, though, everything around me just looked too much a part of itself to have to worry about my feet.

I was walking towards another basketful of empanadas when something in the sidewalk halted my thoughtstream. It was seated on a stoop that was carved out of one section of the sidewalk I was swaying down, and if my eyes had been more cultivated by the earth (like these peoples` are) I might have at first thought it needed to be swept away. But no, this was a stiff-billed hat like coddled topsoil on top of a dusty face with a scorched-tan jacket and pants like roots. It was a man, but it was a man who looked as if he had come directly up from the ground below, the ground that his feet could not even graze from his perch. And I barely realized I was staring at him until I was gone, on the other side, my rhythmic feet being unburdened from my attentions.

I thought little of the man for the rest of the day, mostly about my plans to go dancing with two Buenos Airean girls who worked at homely little Tilcara Hostal. It would have been better to think of good things to think about, though, because once we arrived at our little dinner-and-live-music joint my friend the Language Barrier showed up once again, and with an impressive collection of unnoticeable little knives. The music had a beat and the beer kept my throat lubricated enough that swallowing my saliva was a perpetually winnable battle. And then the hour passes and the Man From The Earth comes up to our table, from some corner or some ancient trap-door, I didn`t see him come in and I didn`t see him in my neck-craning glances of solitude either but I am immensely glad to see him. He is a state of belonging that I have lost in a maze of spontaneously-elected locales. He is anywhere from 45 to 70 and thus seems nowhere between the two. He stands next to the girls and tells them stories with a voice that`s misty (on top of the amplified acoustic guitar and patterned xylophone improv) and the girls laugh and dart glances to each other with the silent conveyance of offbeat amusement that I think must be shared between females of all cultures throughout time and the earthman strings them along as if he has been a part of all cultures throughout time and pays their looks as much mind as distant bolts of thunder. They call him Chiqi. Chiqi Chiqi Chiqi. I smile at him discreetly and excuse myself to a bathroom made of pipes with exposed walls.

Then that`s done and I come back to hear the man at the microphone ask Chiqi to come sing. The room erupts in cheers, even the corner filled with cigarette smoke and soft-bearded old boys with berets wants him to sing and so he does. He comes up to sing one song and is urged into singing three by his local groupies and their touristic copycats. He sings tango, direct and pure, as the leadman paws along with his guitar. It is not the tango I heard in Buenos Aires . . . it does not dip and sink with orchestral flourish, it does not incite flesh to meet flesh out of hazy necessity, it does not outline the shape of a beautiful woman far away who must twirl her loss towards her even as her hands grow cold . . . this is different. It is a goodbye in musical triptych. Shadows from the microphone he holds slices down the center of his face. The room is darker, for him, or maybe because someone turned some lights off. Ten minutes of obscurity, of the deep delight of a child under a table-clothed dinner table full of legs and secrecy, and I am returned.

He walks back over to our table and I tell him: ``Me encanta la voz.`` I love your voice. But no, that`s not exactly right. I love the voice. In Spanish, your voice and your hands and your head don`t belong to you. They just are. I think that When this man pieced himself together from the elements, in his instinctual mission to Make Simple, he must have brought along some grammar with him too.

I saw Chiqi one last time. It was the next night and I was walking around the dark square alone, trying to avoid a distant voice that cried for the necessity of me needing to be around people, even if they were people I would know little about. He was backlit by streetlamps, a sharp shadow against the dull gleam of the church across the plaza. He recognized me and told me he knew where the hostal girls were. We walked for two blocks; he wheezed with each step, and I asked him questions that fit the space between immense curiosity and scant language. He told me that Chiqi is a nickname, My actual name is Roberto Carlos (something something) and I am from Tilcara and this block here, it used to be owned by my grandfather. I asked him ``What was your grandfather`s work?`` and he said ``Yes, work.`` I couldn`t agree more with that answer. Then we entered a little peña, a little dance-bar, and I had to be alone. Chiqi took the couch and the attentions of the Tilcara Crowd and I took a seat facing a wall pasted with old Argentinean political pamphlets mixed with pseudo-pornography. The girls showed up a half-hour later and we didn`t talk. Just before leaving I spotted Chiqi propped up against a wall on a wooden seat, the bill of his hat pulled down over his eyes, fast asleep. And I thought to myself . . . well, perhaps underground is a lonely place to go.

PICTURES!

Okay family and other people I don`t know that are reading this and haven`t already seen these on Facebook, I`ve got some fresh visual evidence that I actually am in South America. Sorry about the shoddy quality of the scanning, once again . . .

This is from the top of a hill that overlooks Salta. The man`s name is Gustavo, he works in the IT Department for a major tobacco company that has prominent fields in the area (and is US-owned), and he was an active and gracious host to me for five nights. We walked the 5k-long road up the mountain and talked about the following things: how cool the iPhone is, basic meditation technique, the fact that there was exactly one blossoming tree on the whole earthy-toned hill and that it was the most lovely shade of pink.

Here`s the main street in Tafì de Valle, a gorgeous little town located in a valley that I stayed at a while back. As you might guess, there wasn`t a lot of rushing around in this here pueblo. Hopefully you can also get a sense for how majestic the valley setting was.

And now we have a vineyard outside of Cafayate. Again, real pretty. The mountains in this area are entirely different from in Colorado . . . much more modest in size, but more rugged and welcoming. They felt like raised, wrinkled lumps of earth. Easy on the eyes.

And here is from the main church in Salta on the holiday I talked about in my last post. A lot of people praying, a lot of people chatting, a lot of people standing around and chilling. So there you go.

Whack Link, Political Ink

Okay, give this one a shot.

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2020107&l=e7276&id=28600444

You should be able to see the pictures from here. I´ll write more soon, still in Salta but I think I´m leaving tomorrow. Saw a ton of people come into the main plaza today for a holiday special to this city, where the icon of the Virgin Mary is carried around the town in procession as a way of remembering a miracle that occurred here some 300 years ago. What I hear is that a huge earthquake ripped through Salta for two straight days, destroying the church, and the people brought the icon of the Virgin out of the rubble and prayed to it . . . which prompted the earthquake to quickly abate. I saw groups of teenagers passed out from exhaustion after having walked from as far as 200 km away for the festival. Serious business. That aside, the most exciting thing I´ve done in the past week is go to the local supermarket and admire the infinite varieties of pasta and yerba mate for sale. I feel privileged to have met two such stand-up people as Gabriella and Gustavo, but I also feel like it´s time to find 2nd gear again.

Finally . . . I wanted to say real quck that my original plan to go to Bolivia in the coming week needed to be amended, due to an outbreak of political-related violence in the country. I am most definitely out of harm´s way here in Argentina, although most of the shaking has been happening in the southern part of the country; much of the Bolivian-Argentinean border has been shut down at this point, and even if it wasn´t I´m not quite up for trying my hand at freelance conflict journalism right now (tools-wise or balls-wise). I do think it´s worth taking a few minutes to read about what is motivating the fighting there right now, though, because it is not an issue foreign to us first-world citizens either . . . when a few people have access to a majority of a greater area´s wealth, is it their duty to share it with people whose lands have considerably less intrinsic riches? And is a moderate consensus possible in such a charged issue? I certainly don´t know, but I do know (via an especially inspirational college professor of mine) that a human life is more valuable than all the idealisms humanity has ever created put together. Including ´´-ocrats´´ and ´´-ublicans´´ and all the stripes, circles, and squares of all the world´s nations. An affiliation should never be confused with a person. That being said, I hope in a month or so I´ll be able to march into that pretty little country with my American dollars and unavoidably feed the ´´ism´´ of travelling that makes what I´m saying right now perhaps a little more interesting than if I was, say, working at your neighborhood Chili´s. I guess the fear is mostly mine, that adding layers of identity obscures something more basic in the human heart.

If I had a Republican to kiss, surely I would feel a little better.

Muchas Cosas, Dudes.

Okay it´s been a while so I´ll do this up the best I can. First, check out this link below:

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2020107&l=e7276&id=28600444

You´ll find a series of poorly-scanned photographs of me hanging out in Rosario, Puerto Iguazú, and Resistencia. I got another disposable camera that´s just about spent, so more snapshots are on the way.

Every city is a different world, a different experience, a different feeling . . . and I´m five cities behind. Here we go.

Resistencia
I wanted to check out some museums at around 1 PM the first full day in town. I found out that I had made my way into siesta country, and couldn´t find anything to do until 3. I dropped into a museum that focused on indigenous cultures, where I found an interesting sight upstairs: a room with some eleven statues of popular local spirits, with branches hanging down from the ceiling over each of them. Thin and winding, with small lights shining down too, and a wall-to-wall mural of thick green foliage. One wall had painted Spanish descriptions of each spirit, and the only thing I could really pick up is that they were all referred to generally as ´´duendes´´. So from there I made my way back to my CouchSurfing host -- a girl named Cecilia, who is finishing up a degree in journalism at the local college and is an aspiring writer just like myself. At one particular point (of many) in which I was fighting heavily with communication in Spanish, she asked me why I couldn´t travel for longer than my itenirary calls for. I said that I needed to return to the US because I had a lot of debt . . . well, I mean to say that, but instead of saying ´´deudas´´ (debt) I said ´´duendes´´. So I told her I had to return home because I have many goblins. This prompted an explosion of laughter and a joke at my expense that continues to this day over e-mail. Later on she told me that Gabriel García Marquez has famously said in a speech of his that he has many duendes, and that they play a role in his writing . . . so maybe my accident was correct.

Tucumán
My weekend in this city was a continuous torrent of raucous laughter and fervorous dancing and passionate people from all over the world. I fell in love five different ways in this city. I don´t have any pictures from it, but if I did they wouldn´t do justice to it and I also don´t think any of you would really want to see them either. It kind of became my little enclave of perfection in the world and I am just as happy that I left it before it became too real as I am sad that it was so fleeting.

Tafí de Valle
Tiny, sleeply little town in a gorgeous valley. I went to Quilmes, which was a nearby ruins of an indigenous fortress. It was a 5-meter walk down a dirt road to and fro . . . on the way back I was encountered by four little mutts barking ferociously. Not a person was in sight, either direction. I walked straight ahead with nary a glance in their direction, and each of them quieted down in turn and trotted beside for a little ways. I was, obviously, the leader of the pack in this city.

Cafayate
Surrounded by vineyards. Went winetasting with an Argentinean man I met in my hostel, which consisted of me listening to elaborate Spanish explanations that I probably wouldn´t have been able to understand in English, tasting a wine, and saying ´´muy bueno´´ repeatedly. I don´t know if you dig wine, but the torrontés here was excellent. They also had a place that sold wine ice cream, which is something I would recommend with a small list of caveats. For example, after a few bites it feels like somebody has put Icy-Hot on your tongue. And once you get down to the cone, it´s just wrong. Just wrong.
This city should have just been made with empty wine bottles, probably. But it was nice.

Salta
YES!!! This is my first deep breath of my trip. I am CouchSurfing with an unspeakably wonderful couple, and I have barely moved from their house over the past two days. I have my own bedroom and computer to use -- which has allowed me to catch up on such minor things happen elsewhere as, oh, I don´t know, the United States Elections -- and I´ve been helping one of my hosts (Gabrielle) with creating a travel itenirary proposal in English for her schoolwork. So I can´t really tell you what this city is like, but I can certainly tell you that I am enjoying it greatly.


So how are all you doing?

Rantflections

I´ve been on the move lately. After spending four nights in Rosario at Sergio´s place I took a night bus way up to the northeastern tip of Argentina - landing in a place called Puerto Iguazú. I stayed there for a couple days and saw some awe-inspiring waterfalls down the road (which I´ll write about when I can scan the photos I took and post them up for you all to see). I was also hogtied with beaurocratic red tape by the Brazillian Embassy in the city . . . I wanted a visa to go see the other side of the waterfalls (they are situation right on the Brazil-Argentina border) as well as visit Brazil at the end of my trip, but they told me that the thirty-day period for tourists starts upon the first entrance so too bad bud. Which would have prompted me to just get two separate visas if they didn´t cost $130 (!!!) for US citizens - about three times the amount as they do for nationals of any other country. My receipt had the answer to the obvious question: the charge is in receprocity for the same amount that the US charges people from all countries of the world as a ¨processing fee¨ for visa applications. (And they don´t refund it if they deny the person entrance, which I hear is quite common.) At first I started thinking like this: ¨Uh, Brazil, I wasn´t in Congress that day when the bill about those fees came up, and I agree with you and all . . .¨ but the more I thought about it the more I applauded it as the sort of blunt government-mandated middle finger that deserved my respect for its pure honesty, if nothing else.

Okay, from there I landed in a little city named Resistencia, where I´m writing from right now. The city´s claim to fame is that they have over 300 statues scattered over the city. They´re obsessed with them. There´s even a law that if you put a statue in front of your house you don´t have to pay taxes for a year. The statues themselves . . . well, they´re nice. But seeing a bust of Albert Einstein´s rusty face in front of Banco Colombia doesn´t really provoke any sort of aesthetic bliss, you know? I should also mention that they are horses and carts here that are actually being used for practical purposes - like, carrying building materials. Which is just the kind of exotica I didn´t know I was looking for . . . since, lately, I´ve been needing some camaraderie in my internal battle against Progress.