by Jerold Last
By that time we were on the highway and the driver/guide indicated that he could no longer talk to us, as he needed to concentrate on driving in the high-speed traffic.
Our coach drove North from Salta, past San Salvador de Jujuy (known to all of Argentina as just “Jujuy”). The geology of the region was amazing---the so-called “hills of the seven colors” were an ongoing photo opportunity due to the striated layers of minerals, which gave rise to the seven colors, and the constant oxidation and wind erosion, which gave rise to shapes and formations that looked like a Technicolor version of the National Parks of the American southwest.
Perhaps in deference to the possibilities of prostate issues among the older gentlemen in our group and the captive audience on the coach for commerce, we took a short break to visit the indigenous village of Purmamarca (translation from Quechua, the language of the Incas: desert city; about 130 miles from Salta) en route to Humahuaca. The village appeared to be in a time warp; all of the construction (houses, shops) was of simple adobe, in what might be described as a strictly Indian style. There was no Spanish influence (colonial or later) apparent. The town was built around a central square, with all of the shops and houses facing the square. The shops featured artisanal goods, the items being sold by shopkeepers, not artists. Items, which were pretty much exactly the same in all of the shops, seemed to be locally mass-produced strictly for the tourist trade.
The average annual rainfall in this area of the Andes mountain range, at an altitude of about 2,324 meters or 7625 feet, is at best a few inches. Thus local farming is done on small plots, which are hand-watered, at a subsistence level. The dependence on tourism to sustain the local population economically is apparent. Except for the paved (at least in some places at the lower altitudes) highway and the tourist buses, much remains similar to what the Spanish must have encountered upon their arrival in this region almost 500 years ago. As we walked from shop to shop and around the square, I had occasional glimpses of our shadow, but he followed us very loosely. He had the advantage of knowing we had to return to the bus and could easily find us there.
The bus departed on time as our group traveled further north and uphill, until about 3,000 meters elevation, to our destination, Humahuaca, near the Bolivian border. The old city is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site that straddles the main highway, a road used by the Incas in their 15th Century conquest of South America. Humahuaca is a colonial city, with the Spanish influence apparent in layout and architecture. However, the strongest impression one gets of Humahuaca, from the moment the bus arrives until it departs, is the pervasive presence of begging children in huge numbers. Poverty is visible everywhere in this region of Argentina, especially among the indigenous peoples. More than 40% by the official estimate, probably far below the actual number, of the population lives below the poverty level, which is 400 pesos per month, about $100 in US currency. There are no social services, food closets, or safety nets for these children, so they beg.
The tour guide announced we’d be having lunch here at one of the local restaurants and we should all meet in the restaurant at 1 PM. We got there on time, as did the others, and found we had the place to ourselves as our group filled it. Our guide tried to steer people towards tables, but the group initially sorted itself out with people who were already acquainted sitting together at the same tables.
I whispered to Suzanne, “It would be fun, and might be instructive, to yank his chain a bit on this guy who’s been following us.”
We waited until he sat at one of the smaller tables in a corner of the restaurant, then walked over to his table.
I pulled one of the chairs away from the table and started to sit down. “Habla ingles?” I enquired politely. No answer.
I sat down at the table and made a production of pulling my chair into position. “Habla espanol?” He ignored me.
Suzanne sat at his table next to me and we talked about what we might order for lunch. That turned out to be a completely useless discussion. We were all given the same multi-course traditional meal consisting of the most typical foods of the region. Presumably there was a kickback to the bus driver and to the tour agency for bringing us into this particular restaurant. We were also entertained by a small band playing Andean music as part of the price we paid for the tour. While the lunch was being served, a group of musicians who looked like indigenous locals dressed in traditional Andean garb played guitar, flute, panpipes, and drums, of all shapes, sizes, and number of strings. The guitarist also sang. The band’s leader was versatile enough to play at least six different instruments.
We began with empanadas, followed by humitas. The empanadas were nowhere near as good as those at the Casa de Empanadas, which answered one of our questions from that memorable brunch our first full day in Salta. The main dish was goat stew. The flavor wasn’t bad at all, but the small pieces of meat in the stew were very bony and hard to eat. Dessert, wonder of wonders, did not contain dulce de leche, but was still too sweet. It was a dish made of caramelized squash and walnuts, with plenty of sugar added in the preparation. Somewhere between the empanadas and humitas our reluctant lunch companion decided to make the best of it and started talking to us about the food, the music, and the town we were visiting. Nobody said anything of importance, but I thought we could still try to get some insight into the man and maybe learn something useful in the process.
“Where are you from?” I asked, when the opportunity presented itself over the goat stew.
He ate a full spoon of his stew. “California,” he replied. “And where are you guys from?
I matched his consumption of a full spoon of the stew. “California too. What a small world!”
Suzanne sipped some stew from her spoon. “What kind of work do you do back home?” she asked politely.
“I’m kind of a commodity trader,” he answered after a few seconds of thought.
I continued to eat the stew. “I’m curious about something. How did you happen to end up on the same bus as we did on this tour?”
He finished his bowl of stew before replying. “I just happened to stop off at the travel agency right after you left it. When I told them we were old friends who traveled down here on the same flight they were happy to match my reservations to yours. Nice people.”
He then redirected the conversation back to food and music until the guide announced it was time for all of us to return to the tour bus.
“Nice talking to you folks,” he said as we stood up. “Maybe we’ll get a chance to take another tour together. I’m planning to stay here in Salta for at least a few more days. I surely do hope to get to know both of you better. Maybe we’ll get a chance to talk somewhere more private than this. I suspect there’s a lot you can tell me about Salta that I don’t know yet if I can find the right way to encourage you.”
And that was that. We walked back to the bus and took our seats, half a bus apart.
“I’m not sure whose chain got yanked there,” Suzanne commented. “I loved the line about being sort of a commodity broker. I have a riddle for you. What do you call your drug dealer in Beverly Hills?
I pointedly looked out the window of the bus before answering. “Often?” I guessed.
That got me a sharp elbow in the ribs. “No, not quite. The answer I was looking for was your commodity broker.”
I turned back from the window to look directly at Suzanne. “I’m not too sure about what he thinks would be the right way to encourage us to tell him more about Salta,” I added. “But I have the feeling that we were just threatened. What did you think about him from the body language?”
Suzanne’s expression became very serious and intense as she thought about her answer. “He wasn’t taking me seriously at all. He assumed you were in charge. I got the feeling that he would have preferred to be punching you out than chatting you up, and was just waiting for the right time and place to do it. I don’t think he’s afraid of you in a fight, which is interesting considering what happened to the last
two guys you got into a fight with. He more or less promised us that we would be talking with him again under conditions that he was going to choose. The inference was that it would be somewhere that we couldn’t get help and that we would be a lot less into yanking his chain when that happened than over today’s lunch.”
Her powers of observation impressed me, as did her ability to interpret his thoughts and actions. “Did you get any feeling whether he was labor or management? Does he just follow orders or is he the one making the decisions down here?”
Suzanne thought about my questions for a bit before she answered. “Based on the body language, what he said and how he said it, and his facial expressions, I’d say that he thinks of himself as a decision maker. I’d also guess he makes his decisions impulsively and is not much of a long-range planner. There was a lot of anger there under his banter with us, and a lot of threatening. Whether somebody in Los Angeles planned it that way or not, I think he’s a loose cannon down here and will take any impulsive action on his own that he wants to without getting someone else’s permission first. I think we need to take his threats seriously.”
We returned to Salta via Jujuy, but by a different route, which took us through Calilegua National Park, a sub-tropical rain forest with more than 150,000 acres of protected wildlife, forest, and wetlands. The rain forest sat by itself in one of the driest areas of South America. It existed because of a trick of the geography and meteorology, as the prevailing winds pushed any clouds that made it this far west in Argentina against one of the higher peaks of the Andes in this region. The clouds had nowhere to go and contained moisture. As they tried to rise into cooler air, it rained. A high percentage of all of the potential rainfall for the region fell in this one relatively small area. From a speeding bus on the winding unpaved road (National Highway Number 9) we could see bromeliads growing in rampant profusion in and from the trees, and largely unspoiled forest canopy. We had one stop in the rain forest, which was a chance for the tourists on the bus to get out and see the trees and plants up close for about 20 minutes.
We wandered away from the group in the direction of several large trees that seemed to be full of orchids in their branches. Suzanne asked me if I understood what bromeliads were and how they grew. I answered no, and she proceeded to explain that bromeliads, or air plants, got their water directly from the moisture in the air rather than through roots. So they could grow on trees, in the air, rather than in soil. The most familiar of the bromeliads was the orchid, but orchids are part of a very large family, and tropical rain forests were the favorite habitat of these plants. We walked deeper into the forest enjoying the exotic trees themselves, as well as the colors and textures of varied bromeliads on tree limbs.
We got back on the bus ahead of the crowd, sat in our seats, and waited 10 minutes or so until the bus began the last leg of our trip. We returned to Salta in time for the evening traffic jam, where we learned the rules of the road for city driving in South America. Whoever gets there first, or is the most macho driver, has the right of way. These were pretty simple rules. The bus driver played chicken with the best, or worst, of the other drivers and got us back to the travel agency sooner than we would have thought possible. We walked over to the hotel, went to our room, and relaxed until dinner.
Dinner was at a nice restaurant suggested by Rosa. Our taxi had no trouble finding it in a residential neighborhood several blocks off the square. In addition to the ubiquitous lomo, it had a salad bar, almost impossible to find in a typical Salta restaurant, and a TV playing softly over the bar in place of a loud folkloric orchestra. It was obviously a neighborhood place with most of the customers being regulars and well off the beaten path for tourists. The food and service were great and the prices were considerably less for better quality food than we had in the plaza. We both had lomo, the best cut of beef we could buy (think filet mignon), large do-it-yourself salads, fried potatoes, and chimichurri, the local variant on salsa. The portion size on the lomo, which was boneless, had to be close to a pound and a half of meat. The vegetables for the salad, especially the leaf lettuce and tomatoes, were fresh and were apparently grown locally. We selected a malbec wine from Cafayate with dinner and weren’t disappointed.
To walk off the effects of our large dinner, we decided to walk to Cerro San Bernardo, a large hill in town with a great view of the city, a distance we estimated at about a mile and a half. The first half of the itinerary was through a dark residential neighborhood, mostly apartment houses rather than single-family houses. As we walked along one of the darker streets there was the loud noise of a big car engine revved up to high rpm. The engine sound was all the warning either of us needed. We both ran into an alley between two apartment houses and watched a large dark car speed past us on the street and disappear. Was this intended to be another warning or was it an attempt to seriously injure or kill us? Or was it just a driver in a hurry to get home? There was no way to know for sure.
Suzanne dusted off her hands and looked closely at me. She seemed to be quite calm, all things considered. “What do you think that was, a Saltanian driver who was a little too anxious to get home or a commodity broker from Los Angeles who didn’t enjoy our company at lunch?” asked Suzanne.
“I don’t know, but I think we should be more careful and stay on well lighted streets or take taxicabs for the immediate future, at least until we can do something about our two commodity broker friends,” I replied.
The second half of our walk was via a well-lit commercial neighborhood of shops, banks, restaurants, and bars. This part of the route should be safe, we thought. The long walk in a new direction showed us another area of the city, while at the same time clearing some of the cholesterol from tonight’s dinner out of our arteries. Eventually, it brought us to the base of San Bernardo Hill, the highest point in Salta City. An inexpensive and convenient cable car took people who wanted to avoid the steep climb, like us, directly to the top of the hill. There were paths from the cable car that made it easy to walk around at the top.
The views across the valley were spectacular during daylight hours, and fascinating at night. The pattern of light and dark indicated where people were and were not, or where electricity was available and where it wasn’t. The city of Salta sprawled off to the south and east, reflecting the huge increase in population over the last two decades. There is no formal zoning, so housing expands in whatever direction is the most affordable. There is no official city planning process. It was starting to cool off, so we decided to walk down the roadway that allows automobiles to climb to the top of the hill, a distance of at least a couple of miles. The taxis on the broad avenue at the base were a most welcome sight, and we returned to the hotel by cab without any further incidents.
I still felt completely awake, a surprise considering how late it actually was, well past 1 AM. It might have been the adrenaline rush from the incident with the car, which hadn’t completely subsided. “Would you like a drink in the hotel bar before we go up to the room?” I asked.
Suzanne seemed to share my high residual adrenaline level. “Sure”.
We ordered pisco sours, the national drink of both Peru and Chile. The cocktail, served in a small glass, tasted a lot like a Margarita.
Suzanne sipped her drink. “Did you know that the pisco sour is the only cocktail that a major war was ever fought over?” Suzanne asked.
I tasted my cocktail. It was lemony but sweet, and very good. “No. Tell me about the pisco war.”
Suzanne finished her drink. The bartender noticed, and he quietly and efficiently replaced the glass with a fresh cocktail. She took an appreciative sip from the new glass. “Pisco is the name of a city now in northern Chile, which used to be in southern Peru. It is also the name of the brandy distilled from grapes, like cognac or grapa, which is produced in large amounts in Pisco. About 125 years ago, Chile and Peru fought a war over bragging rights to pisco, the beverage, and about who would control what is now the northern part of Chile, including Pisco and
the major Pacific Ocean port of Antofagasta. Bolivia and Paraguay got dragged into this war, too. Bolivia lost and became landlocked as Chile took its port at Antofagasta. Peru lost Pisco and some more land in the area. Paraguay lost and ceased to be a major military power in South America. Chile won and got bigger, including the city of Pisco, most of the Atacama Desert, and several important port cities on the Pacific Coast. I think Argentina was also on the winning side. To this day, it’s a felony to try to bring a bottle of brandy, or any other alcoholic beverage called pisco, into Peru. And both Chile and Peru claim the pisco sour as their national drink.”
“What next?” asked Suzanne as we finished our Pisco sours.
“I think a trip to Cafayate should be tomorrow’s highest priority. We can sleep in, drive down in the morning whenever we wake up and have breakfast, and be there before dark. We still need to see what we can learn from Senor Rodriguez’s realtor friend your father visited in Cafayate.”