Listen to the Last Ruins, Feel the City Malaise
1
I managed to get myself out of the town of Cafayate and the province of Salta this morning. Could have stayed in that town a long time. It is one of those pueblos magicos that so often seem to be found in the desert or mountains, in desert mountains, mountainous deserts. But I have places to go, a journey to complete. Uruguay, which has for so long seemed out of reach, is within striking distance. And I am rapidly running out of money. Unfortunately, traveling south and east from Cafayete, because of said desert mountains, the eastern ranges of the Andes, I can travel all day today and likely won’t cover much ground at all from a map’s eye view of the world.
The first significant destination south is San Miguel de Tucumán, six hours, generally referred to simply as Tucumán, and not spoken of very well, even by people from there. Ricardo and Laura — who picked me up hitchhiking a couple days ago in the Quebrada — live in that city, and described it with a resigned sigh as cáotico and feo. The next major stop after that would be Córdoba, another three or four hours, and with the inevitable delays and layovers and hangups inherent in Latin American bus travel, probably too far to get in a day, without going well into night. I am way too far gone on the travel fatigue spectrum to handle a night bus right now.
So I have accepted that I’m probably going to stay the night in a city I don’t want to go to. As a consolation, I am planning to make a stop at the Ruinas de Quilmes a couple hours south of here, apparently one of the more significant archaeological sites in Argentina. My plan was to try to hitchhike there and then catch the afternoon bus to Tucuman, and maybe if the timing worked out perfectly, hop right on another bus to Cordoba.
This morning when I woke at Casa de Árbol, I put the last of my bags together, and sat down to what has become my standard Argentinian breakfast. Tortillas — which here are these layered scone-like pastries — with mermelada de naranja and a cup of yerba mate cocido, mate in a teabag. None of the constituent parts are so great, but together it all works to make a decent breakfast. Said goodbye to the hostel folks and walked through town carrying my bags to where Ruta 40 led south. By 9 o’clock, I was standing in a patch of shade by the roadside, which is early given how late this country stays up.
There wasn’t much traffic leaving town at that hour, and the cars and trucks that passed me by seemed to pay little mind to my raised thumb. After awhile I noticed that a bunch of people were starting to gather, some with bags, half a block back towards town. Walked over and asked if they were waiting for a bus, and a couple women said no.
Combi — meaning some kind of a van — ? — and again, no. One of the women cut to the chase and said no, colectivo, which could mean any number of things. A shared ride of some kind. I asked if this colectivo goes to Quilmes. Si, pasara Quilmes, a las once. Ok. This was good information. I had a backup plan, an eleven o’clock bus I hoped not to have to take.
Went back to try my luck por dedo, but was getting nowhere at a confoundingly slow pace. At five to eleven I cut my losses, not having much interest in sacrificing a day on the altar of hitchhiking. This may make me a bad hitchhiker, but sometimes it’s important to give up. I got all my baggages on again and walked over to the waiting group, mostly ladies of a certain age, some with kids in tow. A few minutes later, a full-size El Indio bus — not what I would ever refer to as a colectivo — pulled up. The bus had a seat free, I had some pesos for to pay for it, and here I am rolling down the road in a comfortable seat with air conditioning. Progress.
After a couple of vineyards — bodegas or estancias, fancy places — outside of town, the terrain turned to green-hued desert. Wiry bushes and sage, cactus, rocky hills the colors of ash and sand. Twenty minutes out, the Calchaqui Valley opened up wide, and we passed through a couple villages with yellow-colored churches, fine grand ranches. On the outskirts of each were wineries with vines and grapes, then back to desert again.
2
Getting off the bus a bit after noon I sat on a boulder in the shade of thorny black-barked trees, had a smoke and took my bearings. The village of Quilmes was just a couple houses, a restaurant and a big billboard for El Pueblo Ancestral. A dry place, just shy of desert. Desert with pines and dry willow like trees. Drank some mate cocido from my thermos, which two weeks into heavy usage is losing its ability to maintain the temperature of the beverage inside. It keeps things warm for awhile.
A gray colored fox — zorro — light on his feet, crossed the road a little ways up, and crept into some bushes. A minute later, a black dog came racing in out of nowhere, plunging dramatically into the brush, and then nothing. I waited and waited, but there were no sights or sounds, a completely still scene. It had started with such dramatic promise, but the players were making me wait too long for a payoff or even a build to the story, so I gave up on them and walked across the street.
The sign in front of the restaurant said Se Guardan Mochilas so I took my bags in there and happily left them in a back corner for thirty pesos. I asked the lady at the desk how far the ruins were and she said no está lejos and I said como? and she said no lejos. She asked if I wanted an almuerzo, and I said despues, gracias and walked out the door. I crossed to the other side of Ruta 40 and up the bone-white road towards the mountains in the distance, out of the shade, under a hot hot sun.
Thirty minutes up, no ruins in sight, the third passing car stopped for me, a young kid in an aging black compact car with tinted windows. I hopped in and thanked him thoroughly. He was a cocinero at the restaurant up at the museum and late for work, driving too fast on the washboard sand, tires slipping their grasp on the curves. For some reason I didn’t feel disturbed by this. He seemed like he knew the road. When I was his age I also worked as a cook, and was often late for work, driving too fast, and somehow I had made it.
The ruins came into view at a distance ahead, and I saw stone walls ascending the mountainsides which in Perú would be agricultural terraces. Son gradas? No, he said, eran viviendas. People had lived up there. He pointed out the fortalezas high above, on either side of the settlement. We arrived at the parking lot, I thanked him, he rushed into work through a side door and I went through the main entrance into the museo, a much more modern and impressive facility than what you’d find at a comparable site in all the countries I’d been through.
There were several rooms of artifacts, depictions and models, and some decently well-produced videos of the various aspects of life and death here at Quilmes. The settlement was founded around 800 AD and was the political and ceremonial center for a wide area and population, who considered it their sacred city. The residents lived here at the base and up on the knees of these sheer dry mountains, farming along the Río Santa María, down where I had come from in the village.
The ancient people of Quilmes, related to the Diaguita indigenous people who today live in this part of Argentina, were indomitable. They fought off the Incas and though they became incorporated as part of Tawantisuyo, it was to some extent under their own terms. Almost eight hundred years after its founding, this was still a functioning and independent settlement when the Spanish arrived. The Quilmes people proceeded to resist these last invaders for a century before breaking.
Their defeat required cutting them off from their agricultural lands in the valley below and poisoning their water supply which came from the mountains above. The things that humans do to each other, to the earth. The survivors of the siege were marched on foot under brutal conditions all the way down to Buenos Aires, and the fifteen percent that survived that were assigned to a mission on the Rio de la Plata where most died from disease. I have heard this story before, in my own country.
Walking up to the stone foundations in harsh desert, it was hard to imagine why people would choose to live out here when there were more fertile areas relatively close by. Maybe the environment was markedly different when streams still came down from the mountains. Walled against stone, this would have been an easier place to defend than the lowlands.
Rather than go straight up to the high places, I cut over to the side of the site, on the edge of the desert, and another reason for this choice of location came to my mind. The Book of the Hopi, in some ways the inspiration for this journey, tells the story of how those people came to live in the southwest of the United States, the region today called the Four Corners, another arid and challenging environment. The people who had completed all four great migrations — north, south, east and west, as far as could be walked, four times over; the descendants of the people who had not gotten lost along the way, who had kept the faith through generations of wandering, returned to the crossroads, the place where the trail of all the migrations met.
The Hopi leaders proclaimed that this desert was where they were meant to settle down, despite having found many easier and more prosperous landscapes in the course of their migrations. They believed that it was only in such an inhospitable place that people would live in peace with each other, because they would be forced to live simply and collectively to survive. In more fertile locales, people would grow rich, lazy and greedy. Life is not easy or plentiful in the desert, but what is there is strong, vibrant, clear in its spirit.
I wandered under the sun for a couple hours among the well-preserved walls, thousands of small stones placed in such a way that after centuries, they still hold together without mortar. In the thicker walls, the marrows were filled with sand and loose rock, and in some, much larger stones were interspersed seamlessly. These constructions were more reminiscent of Chachapoyas or Huari than the stonework of the Incas, but no people worked with stone like the Incas did. This seemed more like what humans should be capable of, given tremendous amounts of time and energy, and if they loved and were present to stones more than most of us could understand. These walls were beautiful in their equilibrium of chaos and order.
There were wide open plazas, enclosed, sunken courtyards, little pyramids and domes of stone, which I recognized from various parts of Perú as chullpas, funerary towers or pyramids. The more I looked, the more details I found in common with sites I’d seen all the way up to Ecuador. There was an overlapping ancient Andean culture that spanned thousands of miles over millenia, and continues to exist today. In some places colored or white stones had been placed decoratively, mostly in geometric or abstract designs, but in one place, a llama was clearly depicted. I found a wide flat stone with a series of rounded holes cut into it, which I knew to be a calendar of full moons from Incapirga.
This would almost certainly be the last archaeological site I would come to on my journey to Uruguay, or at least the last big one. From here on I’d be in cities, and my route was about to leave the Andes. From what I understand, the indigenous peoples of the lowlands south and east of here had been more nomadic, and where they were sedentary, they hadn’t left stone cities behind. That’s one thing I’ve learned from all these ruins: it’s really only the stone that remains. The settlements built from wood, from adobe are mostly gone.
I wanted some kind of resolution to all the sites I’d seen from México on, a tall request. Clearly this was indeed a sacred place, and a reverence for stone and earth and mountain was apparent. As I climbed higher the constructions straddled and framed giant basalt boulders; in the upper area many of the walls were built into natural rock formations. In this it was like the Inca places. The profound silence was perhaps the most defining feature, somehow more silent than if it had only been the side of a mountain. This city was just bones. I completed my wanderings with a sit up at the fortaleza guard post to the north, a commanding view of the desert below, thousands and thousands of cacti in place of the humans who once lived here.
From the opposite flank of the mountain, a group of noisy birds emerged, flew shrieking above the ancient city and were gone. I realized as they passed they were green parrots. Small green parrots just like in Arequipa along the Río Chili, just like in Mid-City New Orleans. Are there perhaps pericos that migrate from country to country, continent to continent? Or are they everywhere? What were they doing here, in these desert rocks?
Just like the fox and the dog earlier, the parrots were a sign, but of what? I had just enough of sense to know these were omens, but not enough to understand them. I wanted to savor the place, come to some reckoning with the sum of all the lost cultures I’d crossed paths with, but the stones were quiet. That was the lasting feeling I was left with, and maybe from the totality of all the sites I’d seen, the silence, the lack of the people who built these places, the loss of culture and ancestors. And in that silence, some whisper of what they felt was important and real in their world. They were telling me down through the centuries that this was a sacred place, and I could see why, looking out upon the earth, hills and stone and cacti, the terrain growing gradually more verdant until it hit a ribbon of river a few miles off. As I looked south and east, it felt like I could see the mountains easing down into flatlands. It was all here, a window between worlds. High and low, dry and wet, life and death, past and present.
It began really to dawn on me that this day I would be leaving the Andes, where except for a few brief excursions down to the Pacific, I’d spent the last fifteen months, since the center of Colombia. Though they extended south, separating Argentina from Chile, green from dry, all the way to Tierra del Fuego, I sadly had no current plans to return to them. By the time I got to Uruguay, I would be more or less broke, and the wages of an English teacher combined with an expensive city did not promise a life wiht much travel. I wasn’t ready to leave the Andes —after over a year of my life, I didn’t feel done with them, didn’t feel like I properly understood them yet. Done or not, there was no refuge up there from the beating down sun, and the need for shade was more pressing than any sense of sentimentality or perspective.
I made my way slowly down the trail and through all the rows of foundations on the desert floor, out of the ancient city, and started walking back down the sand dust road. Some ways out a car stopped for me, middle-aged tourists from Buenos Aires. We didn’t talk much and they dropped me at the restaurant on the main road where I’d started. While recovering my baggage, I bought four empanadas de carne, which I ate watching the road, sitting on the same boulder as before. Delicioso. Beef, potato and red pepper, wrapped in a corn masa.
Whenever a car came by I’d get up and make an attempt at hitchhiking, but it was only about a car every fifteen minutes, and the first two made no acknowledgement of my existence. The third was a big white Alconquija bus bound for Tucumán. I held up my hand and they had a seat for me, a window seat in the back and we carried on down this desert valley. This was the second time today I tried to hitchhike and ended up catching a bus. The scenery was very consistently nondescript scrub-brush desert, and I fell asleep as we slowly crawled up over the dry mountains.
A couple hours south we came down into what could have been a different country. The other side of the rain shadow: grass covered mountains, horses and cows and sheep, grazing in the deep greens of a beautiful valley. It was unimaginable that you could drive a few hours and get from that place to this.
Soon we were in the town of Tafí del Valle, which might as well have been in Switzerland, A-frame cabins and all. There was a brilliant blue lake below town, and for a moment I contemplated just getting off the bus. Stepped down for a smoke at the terminal and was delighted to find the air cool and crisp there. Just lovely. For a few minutes I daydreamed about walking out in these green moors, then thought the better of it and got back on the bus. The specter of Getting Somewhere, which I had not yet achieved on this day of travel, held sway.
Below Tafí, on our slow descent down a pass to the lowlands, there were actual trees again, forests of them, rivers with significant water. The changes in ecosystem here along the edges of the Andes are remarkable, how quickly it can go from desert to grasslands to forest. Around dusk we came into Tucumán, slogging through traffic.
3
A grimy city, ugly modern constructions, trash scattered on the sidewalk, people looking worn-down, the smell of pollution in the air. As I had feared, it was too late to get a bus to Córdoba that day. If at all possible, I have learned to avoid arriving in big cities late at night. Just not a good plan. So I walked out into the humid street carrying all my many bags, busy evening bustle, a chaotic feel, malls and markets with people and cars and taxis and motos coming and going. Six blocks later I paid too much for a shared room at a crappy hotel, lacking the stomach for further explorations.
It was a small windowless room, no frills whatsoever. Poorly kept up, but at least it was clean. The other resident of this shared room was out, and from the looks of their bags and things they were on some modest business travel. I turned the AC wall unit up and just laid on my bed for awhile. It is so demoralizing to trade a good place for a bad one, and pay a bunch of money to get there. I’d thought Córdoba was a few hours away. Turns out it’s nine. This is a big country.
I ventured out in search of dinner, and ended up three and a half blocks away as one of the only customers at a big place called Restaurant El Portal. Out here on the dark patio, I’ve eaten half a pizza, which has left my stomach heavy. Something like focaccia bread drowned in oily cheese without flavor, slices of pale tomato, undercooked onion, hard-boiled egg, three whole green olives with pits. A strange pizza. I knew it wouldn’t be very good when I ordered it, but it was cheap and the buses are carisimo, so I have to watch my pesos.
Today I paid five hundred and twenty for five and a half hours of buses, but what’s disturbing is the cost to get to Cordoba tomorrow. The cheapest I could find was twelve hundred pesos, the equivalent of twenty seven dollars. That will bust my thirty dollar a day budget right up. Coming down to these lowlands after being up in the cordillera for almost two weeks has left me with a lingering headache, which usually comes with big changes in elevation. The air is heavy here, thick and humid and I am unaccustomed to it. For the past year or more when I’ve been at low elevations, it was at the desert Pacific. Humidity with a capital H, a condition I have endured for much of my life, seems now very foreign and unpleasant. A few weeks on the road on this leg of my journey after leaving behind my Arequipa home is getting the better of me. Not a whole lot left in the tank of my wanderlust.
4
The first two bus options were six in the morning or one in the afternoon, and yesterday on my way out of the bus terminal, I chose the latter, despite the fact that this would put me into a big city at night. The thought of getting right back on a bus in a matter of hours just seemed cruel and unusual. I woke up early, with a chunk of a day before I had to leave, and had some impulse of salvaging this stop, finding something decent in this city.
I got my things together, checked out of my room, and sat down in the dining room to eat an uninspired hotel breakfast of stale pastries. My cheapness was leading me astray: this breakfast was included, so I must eat it. The guy at the front desk allowed me to leave my bags in a storage closet, and I set out for a little walk. Tucumán felt a little less seedy in the morning, though now it was piping hot to go along with humid. I headed toward the center, figuring eventually I’d get to some old buildings or a decent plaza. But it just went on and on, third rate little shopping malls, junky plastic goods stores, architecture of the concrete block, traffic, noise.
After about ten blocks I turned off on a side street and from a little bodega I bought a couple baguettes with salami and cheese for the day’s travel, and some mandarins. I sat on a curb and watched the city go by without joy. There was nothing more for me to do in this town. Having left the Andes feels like a mistake. I retreated back to my hotel and quietly commandeered a table in a deserted back room that perhaps is used for banquets. Made some mate cocido and sat down to write, briefly about this morning, and then about some of my last days in Colombia, which feels like years ago. The town of Jardín in Antioquia, stopping in to see Anna from La Pacha at that hippie hostel. I had almost lost myself in dream memory when it was past time to get to the bus terminal again. This point in a journey is like a losing streak at a casino table: just hoping the next hand will turn things around.
