Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (14 page)

Shortly after I returned from a dinner of llama meat with creamy mashed potatoes covered in grilled goat’s cheese with my new friends from the tour group, I met Leandro. He was hanging out in the courtyard of the Mama Coca Hostel with a bunch of his Argentinean friends and two Germans.

We all got chatting and, thankfully, the slow, monocled hunchback who governs my dusty, musty internal language library allowed me to access enough Spanish to converse. This being Argentina and roughly 10.30 p.m., they asked me out for dinner. I told them I was already full of llama but went along anyway.

Copious amounts of red wine later, I found myself trudging up a darkened version of Cerro de los Siete Colores with the chatty Leandro at my side, plus even more booze and an assortment of musical instruments. The plan was to sing under the stars.

The walk to our destination was via a gravelly upward spiral, made slightly more strenuous due to the altitude, and overlooked by a grinning moon rising across a majestic Milky Way. We found a spot to sit high above the flickering lights of Purmamarca, as close as I’d ever been to shooting stars. A guitar playing, drumming and singing concert followed and I was instantly dumbfounded. These boys, all from Buenos Aires, turned out to be the most incredible musicians.

We sang in a multitude of languages and improvised new songs, all the while swigging from our red wine bottles as we sat on the cold dirt. Occasionally someone would sneak off to pee in the shadows and we’d all jump up, afraid of a random weetrickle rolling back down the hill. As the wind whipped around us and I hugged a borrowed jacket over my knees, we talked between songs about the presence of Pachamama, the spirit of Mother Nature ever present in earth, wind, fire and water, which people here believe to be as real as their very own mother. I was fascinated.

It was one of those rare unplanned nights that make travelling alone seem like the only way to do things. Even though it gets lonely sometimes, had I been with anyone else that first night in Purmamarca, I probably would have bypassed the chatty group in the courtyard and taken myself to bed, happy and full of llama. You just never know what might happen when you start talking to strangers. The world can grow bigger and brighter in a second and doors can fly open that may have stayed locked otherwise.

Leandro and I formed a bond that night over singing and discussing the earth and, singing loudly as we made our way drunkenly down the hill. At one point, I fell and cut my knees, something I found weirdly thrilling because I don’t think I’ve done that since I was about six. I felt giddy with wine and the altitude and even higher on the thought of Pachamama watching over us all. By day, the hill has seven colours. By night —
that
night at least — it had thousands more. We painted them ourselves with languages and music and laughter.

The next day, Leandro’s friends caught the bus back to Salta in order to fly back to Buenos Aires. The Germans wandered off elsewhere, and Leandro, who was due to stay a couple more days, decided to take me to nearby Tilcara to check out the ancient
pucará
, or fortress, there. This pre-Inca fortress has now, however, been remodelled to the point where it’s really not a pre-Inca fortress at all. There’s even an entirely irrelevant pyramid at the top of it, close to the viewing platform, from which you can see for miles across the mountain towns, their slithering roads all silvery with mirages. The pyramid is a monument dedicated to two explorers who did a lot for the area, although I couldn’t help but think of how they’ve now ruined it, a bit.

The cacti dominating the landscape were insane. There were way more than we saw the other day, literally thousands clustered together and looking from a distance like a spiky army. Leandro and I took photos of each other among them, some as huge and wide as ancient sycamore trees, and imagined they were people once, who’d had a spell cast upon them, destined to scorch forever in an environment as inhospitable as the evil witch who’d pointed her wand at them.

It can’t escape your attention that everything in the
pucará
is designed to hurt you, from the sun to the dry air that burns your throat and the barbed wire gardens created by the cacti, but it’s eerily beautiful, like stepping onto the planet from a distant galaxy after the apocalypse … or maybe a life-changing visit from the
Maestros Ascendidos
?

We had a beer in a rare shady outside spot in Tilcara itself (even more dusty than Purmamarca but totally like being in Tomb Raider) and Leandro told me a story about a man who broke his horses in from birth by licking them all over and biting off their umbilical cords to make them believe he was their mother. Not sure where that came from or why, but it was interesting. I find Leandro very interesting. He’s the kind of guy who can talk for hours about everything and nothing at the same time.

So you see, it was a lovely night, counting shooting stars, and it was a beautiful following day counting cacti. And on reflection, if I’d have left it there and not agreed to go with Leandro to a restaurant and order a large assortment of unknown meats, it would undoubtedly have been a lovely evening, too. But the fun stopped back in the hostel when, midway through a bottle of wine, my stomach began to churn. I had a vision of the blood sausage I’d eaten at dinner — and not enjoyed at all — laughing at me from the plate and, after a mad dash to the bathroom, there it was again, laughing at me in pieces from the toilet. Oh, the shame.

For nine straight hours I vomited until there was nothing left inside me to vomit, and then I vomited air. By 2 a.m. I had moved into Leandro’s dorm room at his command and he spent the night making me drink water so that I could further clean my stomach by puking it up. The walls were so thin throughout the hostel I’ve no doubt I kept everyone up.

Leandro rubbed my back and told me it was OK and the next day, being a frank and direct Argentinean man, he told me I looked like shit and needed a cold shower. I obliged while he fetched me some medicine from the pharmacy: droplets which I was instructed to squeeze into water and drink every four hours to keep the nausea away. These rendered me a zombie. For the whole of that day I lay in that single dorm room bed like a dying hospital patient with Leandro in the next one, refusing to leave me.

He strummed guitar, read me poetry, wouldn’t let me drink any old water with bubbles in it, because he said it would be drinking bad energy. He spoke of history and the myths of the land, and stroked my hair sympathetically as I groaned and writhed and generally acted in a way that was wholly unattractive. During my saner moments, we discussed at length love and relationships, the world and its infinite layers, and the fact that Pachamama was probably trying to keep me here in Purmamarca for some reason.

We discussed how, in spite of all of the colours, shapes and sizes in Argentina, there’s no real racism here because everyone’s the same; all subject to the same shitty politics and economic dysfunction. He even told me how Mama Coca, the hostel owner, had spent a good hour that morning while I was asleep, telling him that, although she’s seventy-one, not a day goes by when she doesn’t fall in love with her husband all over again, and she loves it particularly when they disagree over politics. She also told Leandro that every time she cleans the hostel, she plays a game with the wind, which she always wins when she succeeds in sweeping the dust from the floor into her bin without it blowing away first.

Leandro sang me his own songs in Spanish and played classics from Charly Garcia, the Argentine rock musician. We watched YouTube videos of people singing random notes at piles of salt and watched the salt move of its own accord into inconceivable patterns and shapes in response — I’ve never seen anything like this before, you must look these up! He told me that the frequency of the earth is F-sharp, the same frequency as that of our bodies, meaning we’re all literally designed to be in perfect tune with this planet. He proved it by whipping out the guitar tuner and, as it hovered on and off F-sharp in the silent room, I almost forgot to want to vomit.

Honestly, it was one of the most incredible days for all the things I didn’t do while lying in that stuffy, darkened dorm with Leandro. The sun continued to scorch the life out of the desert world beyond the doors but we stayed there till dusk, when my stomach was empty and I hadn’t vommed for roughly six hours and it was high time for an empanada.

Even though it was a brief exchange, Leandro and I discussed the connection that we both noticed instantly, and discovered our birthdays are just four days apart. Sure, I could have done without the embarrassment of puking all night or falling down the hill and cutting my knees, but as he noted so eloquently, sometimes Pachamama forces her hand … especially when she really thinks you should be doing something differently.

I considered that perhaps we were supposed to connect right there and then, to meet in the middle and share our thoughts, to slow down and look at the world in another way for a while. It’s nice to believe that cursed people can take the form of cacti, that every human can harmonise at F-sharp and paint fifty shades of colour over a seriously grey day.

I waved Leandro off as he left to return to Buenos Aires. I wished him well, as he did me for the next step of my journey into Bolivia, said goodbye and watched his bus roll away in a cloud of dust that I have no doubt Pachamama made twirl and dance around him as a final serenade. Sometimes life throws the most incredible, kind and inspiring people into your path just when you need them most. And sometimes, I think, at least when Pachamama gets involved, the things you think you want to forget, like dying in a hostel in the sticks of northern Argentina, are the ones you end up remembering quite fondly, forever.

**By the way, if you’re wondering about the llama, it was all right. A bit like a tougher version of beef, really. I much prefer their woolly jumper offerings than their flesh on a dinner plate but the Americans enjoyed it.

27/10

I followed the masses off the bus when we arrived in La Quiaca and found myself standing on a bustling sidewalk, with Winnie asking ‘Where’s Bolivia?’ I walked around for a bit and then got worried. I wasn’t entirely certain I wasn’t already in it. Maybe I’d slipped through some unofficial border as I wheeled my suitcase around and had actually already left Argentina? Wondering as to the location of a country from a street corner was not my finest travelling moment. I was just about to pull out the
Lonely Planet
when a teenager called Diego from Buenos Aires noted my consternation and came to the rescue. He offered to share a taxi with me to the border, which took about seven minutes in the end.

Once there, we checked out of Argentina, walked two metres more along a ramp and checked into Bolivia (I’m aware I’m using Foursquare terms here but, seriously, it was that simple), whereupon my teenage friend pointed the way and we walked the five or so blocks together towards the Villazón bus station, stopping for a freshly squeezed orange juice along the way.

This one road was packed with stalls selling much the same stuff as those in Purmamarca, but it was clearly a world away from Argentina. Women in giant, voluminous skirts, tiny pork pie hats and colourful jackets, with long plaits down their backs, were sucking on oranges or cramming wedges of coca leaves into their mouths. Bags of the leaves were everywhere, as was an array of cheap and alarmingly ugly pyjamas dangling from coat hangers. Walking wasn’t easy. It felt like every breath was difficult to inhale and my heart was pounding. Then I remembered Villazón stands at 3447 metres above sea level and any form of altitude sickness was only going to get worse from here.

I was all prepared to get the train to Tupiza, where I’d made a booking at the recommended Valle Hermoso II Hostel, but Diego said there was a quicker and cheaper way to go. Before I knew it, I was crammed into the back of a van with a family of five and numerous bags of what looked like papayas wedged into every available gap. We paid our twenty bolivianos each (well, I paid for Diego because he’d been kind enough to help me find the country) and off we went.

Which all brings me to where I am now, sort of — hard of hearing in the middle of nowhere, at the end of day two of my four-day jeep tour to the salt flats of Uyuni.

I remember the moment it happened. I was shuffling what was left of my tattered silicone earplug in my ear in order to permanently block the intolerable snorer keeping me awake in the hostel when I did just that. I blocked her (yes, her) permanently. With a tricky finger manoeuvre that went awry, followed by a swift bout of panic, I managed to lodge the tiny remnant of earplug in a totally unreachable part of my ear canal. So I’m now deaf in my right ear. I can’t hear a thing, which of course was my initial aim, but I kind of hoped it would be reversible.

When I realised I couldn’t hear, I dashed to the bathroom in the darkness, soaking my socks on the grim, flooded floor and desperately rinsing my ear over the tap in the hope that I would dislodge it and hear that blessed little pop you get when balance is restored. But then I realised the cold air and water were probably setting the silicone even further into a hardened mass in there and that all hope for a continued Bolivian tour in stereo sound was sadly lost.

I know now that you’re not supposed to insert tiny pieces of this stuff and that the only safe way to use these large shape-shifting globlets of white putty is to shove them in whole over the top of your ear openings (never in fully, you see), but really, when it’s 2 a.m. and you can’t sleep and someone’s doing a vocal impersonation of a machine gun across the freezing dorm room, you don’t remember the details. When you’re dizzy from lack of sleep at 4000 metres in some off-the-map Bolivian village and your heart is beating like a hummingbird just from turning over in your hired sleeping bag, and the machine gun’s getting louder to the point where you start to doubt that such a sound could actually be coming from a human (let alone a girl), the last thing you’re thinking to yourself as you reach for those sweet silicone saviours is, ‘Oh, I should probably read the health and safety warning on my earplug container.’

So, day two dawned on a deaf ear for me, and whereas day one was about nine tedious hours of driving, stopping for photos and getting to know the others in my jeep — a permanently smooching/snuggling Belgian couple from Brussels who are very nice when they separate lips and take on their own individual forms, and a single and slightly annoying French-Italian guy — today we were promised spectacular sights within the Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa. Understandably most people just call it ‘the park’.

This was declared a protected area in 1981 for the benefit of native animals like flamingos, ostrich-like rheas and vicuñas. It cost us 150 bolivianos each to enter yesterday evening at around 5 p.m. — another hidden extra in the price of the trip from Tupiza, which will culminate in a visit to the world’s biggest salt flat, Salar de Uyuni.

Unlike most, who’ll be deposited in Uyuni city when we get there, I’ve opted to go back to Tupiza in the jeep afterwards so I can do a horse-riding tour via the hostel with some fun girls I met in the lobby. We were all waving our phones in the air, trying desperately to get a decent wi-fi signal like some mixed nation, uncoordinated girl band (Internet is near non-existent in Tupiza), when we got to discussing the potential awesomeness of two full days on horseback. Still high from my gaucho and wine-fuelled adventures at Estancia Los Potreros, I wound up paying the equivalent of $230 for the two tours (salt flats and riding), plus two nights at the hostel, and I’ve a sneaking suspicion I was overcharged a bit, as the hostel manager assaulted me in a flurry of Spanglish at lightning speed and bashed numbers into a calculator.

Anyway, first, here I am off on another salty expedition. In the jeep. I can’t explain to you the arse-pummelling bumpiness of these South American road trips, by the way. Most of the time you’re on roads so rocky it’s a wonder the tyres don’t burst. Doing anything other than looking out of the window is near-on impossible. I couldn’t even read my Kindle. I shoved more coca leaves in my cheek, as they really do help combat the motion and altitude sickness, even if they make you look like a hamster.

Unfortunately, sucking and then chewing the leaves did nothing to aid the unblocking of my ear, but on the positive side, this means I can only partially hear the God-awful Bolivian music our guide insists on playing as he drives … which I’m sure I’ll come back to. I really can’t talk about it right now because, to be honest, just the thought of it irritates me to the point of wanting to slam my other ear into a cactus bush.

My group is discovering that there’s a vast difference in the quality of this trip, depending on the guide and cook you have travelling with you. Our guide is a smiley Bolivian man called Santos, who has a big bulging belly full of Coca-Cola. I know this because, as he drives, he swigs it from a two-litre bottle and consequently grows fatter by the day, probably. He doesn’t speak any English but, according to the Belgians and the French-Italian, all of whom speak decent Spanish, he doesn’t offer much information in any language, really. He’s very nice, though, and drives the jeep very carefully — as you would if you were permanently caffeinated to the max and in danger of locking the steering wheel with your stomach.

Our cook, assigned only to us four, is a very sweet and wrinkled lady called Ilda, who’s incredibly quick with a warm smile and a laugh but not so speedy with the food. Last night, everyone else at our shabby new hostel had eaten and gone to bed before our food showed up, by which time we had all stuffed ourselves silly with biscuits to stave off the hunger. Watching the others tuck into offerings of fried chicken, chips and salad, all smacking their lips and leaning back in satisfaction, we played and sang along to a French guy’s guitar to pass the time and looked forward to our own feast. But when the food turned up it was … well … how can I say this without sounding ungrateful? It was instant mash and chewy beef bolognese in a watery sauce. Make what you will of it.

Of course you can’t complain, can you? This is Bolivia. These cooks are probably being given a set amount of money to cater for their jeep and in some cases they spend it all on delicious food; in other cases they spend most of it on a new llama for their family and use what’s left to feed their tour group. Anyway, we ate it all, along with yet more stale bread (as seems to be the norm for bread in Bolivia) and sloped off to bed dejectedly.

So here I am, about to turn the lights out on day two in another random room in a Bolivian village I don’t even know the name of. It’s cold but they’ve given us numerous blankets and, in spite of there being no plug sockets and no flushable toilets (you should see the disgraceful turds people have dropped in them anyway — tut), it’s not actually too bad. And what’s even better, I guess, is that I only need one earplug tonight.