Aimless Wandering

I eat breakfast at a small café, El Mate, buy two liters of water and cross the river in search of a way up the beige and green rock so reminiscent of Arizona. After a fruitless search for an established path, I follow a silty wash that descends out of the maw of the mountain. The omnipresent barking of dogs fades away as the wash ascends and narrows. I spot an Argentine flag on one of the summits. Where there is a flag there is a trail, I reason, but my search fails.



I follow a tributary that could lead me to the top. The terrain is loose rock and loose rock cemented tenuously in place by packed mud. As the way steepens I get the idea that the earth and stone will break easily beneath my feet, so I go back, practically sliding on my ass, to the main wash to find a different way.



I find it. After a couple, brief, easy scrambles up shelves of packed mud and stone, there is a relatively gradual ascent to the top and a panoramic view of Tilcara, and on the other side, a large arroyo and red mountains nestled in the larger range. I know where I want to go next.


I follow some abandoned railroad tracks parallel to the Rio Grande to a trestle, full of gaps and unsafe to cross. It traverses a large, silty arroyo which I will take to the red hills. I pass a farm with the odd looking appendage of a Direct TV satellite dish and I brace for the farm dog to give chase, but not this time. I pass the largest, densest grove of saguaro I have ever seen, that grows more sparse as the red hill ascends.





The arroyo I trace soon narrows to a slot and I feel just a bit more claustrophobic as a few clouds gather overhead and some stray drops start falling. I climb as far as I can, but the way becomes loose, steep and way too precarious and I make my way down having risked all I was willing that day. I spot a stone monument atop a small hill which turns out to be the crest of Pukara. I don’t find a shortcut across the river, so I trod on, the wind, by this time, blowing with some force.

In the Tilcara market, I find a beautifully carved box of distressed wood with a llama a mountain scene carved on the lid. I get a map of the town with it, and a free postcard. I plan my next route on the map and save the postcard. I set out for Pukara, not quite knowing what to expect. I soon understand that I’m on my way to the monument I spotted earlier in the day. I pass gated llama at the entrance and one gives me such a puckered look that I fear it will spit at me, so I exit to the ruins.



They are eerily similar, an analog, to the pueblos in Arizona. This could be Tuzigoot in central Arizona. The houses all look about the same except that the church had an altar for unspecified sacrifices. For some reason, I feel hungry and tried to stave off sugar starvation with a $3.50 Pomero Gatorade. Over a dollar for this, and it seems like the price is jacked up for my benefit.



A place called Garganta del Diablo is noted on my map, and though I’m not expecting anything remotely similar to the one in Iguazu here in the desert, my curiosity is piqued. I climb up the road past a water treatment plan and turn a bend and it soon grows apparent that either the map is wrong or the Garganta isn’t what I expected. The road hugs the mountain then loops back into the highly situated barrios of Tilcara.



The clouds are lowering and gusts blow by with increasing force. Some lightning bolts zap far off mountains, so I make my way briskly towards the hostel. When I encounter chaperones of some high school kids I point in the general direction, correcting for my error in navigation, and hope they don’t mind walking in storms on exposed mountain ridges, a condition a little too scary for my lily liver.





A dog runs with purpose towards home and I walk in the same vein. I make it in just as the storm begins and put on a pot of water. I drink coffee and eat a cylinder of cookies I keep for such an occasion.



I take a very cold shower after I fail to work the calefaccion once again, and change into the last of my clean clothes. A girl, Melissa, sticks her head into my room and invites me out to dinner and I marvel how easy it has suddenly has become here in Argentina.



She’s a sexologist, she tells me, as we open a bottle of wine and I take almost instantly to her, but not because of that. We listen to reggae and talk. But she is nearly falling asleep so we leave. She pops back out of the hostel and a few moments later she is dragging me back out. A Bolivian singer is performing at the café in which I saw jazz the night before. Alas, when we arrive the show is done, but a show of sorts has ended up at our table. A drunk native with missing front teeth serenades us trying to convince us he is part of the act. He chats us up, well, mostly Melissa, and we try to tell him "chau." He finally falls asleep at our table.