Walking the countryside, running from dogs

I skip the hostel breakfast to see what I can find in town, thinking I’ll save some money. I find little. I slip into an empty restaurant (not the one pictured) and after some confusion with the waiter as to what I could possibly want there, he brings me weak coffee and a few hard squares of pan and some orange marmalade. What this restaurant functions as I can’t tell, but its definitely not to serve food.

I buy a liter and a half of mineral water from the hostel wet bar for 2pesos. I find a donkey trail over the hills of red clay and rock that look every bit of Sedona, save for the saguaros. I soon find my siren call, a cluster of mountains striated red and green . I start a steady ascent across the rock and thorny shrubs. I follow a dirt road and spot a small village in the distance. I sidetrack towards my destination on a narrower road traversing the base of the mountains. From a tiny hut set up in a wash a dog gives chase so I back away and give the hut and a the dog wide berth.

I switch between traveling burro paths and washes until the wash peters out to rivulets, an ominous sign. I reach the terminus of the ascent and I’m staring down into a deep canyon. I parallel the cliff and skirt the perimeter of a small peak until I find a burro trail leading down from a saddle to a road I spotted from above. It leads to a tiny village of farms and a large arroyo draining the mountains I want to reach.

I find another burro trail hoping to bypass the farm and the possibility of more vigilant dogs. I’m stopped by a barbed wire fence enclosing another farm and see the day’s laundry hanging out and I hear a farm dog. I climb straight up the mountain trying to clear myself out of the dog’s range. I see him from my perch, big, black and running down the trail in pursuit of me. I scramble further up a wash and cower behind a hill but the dog holds its ground. But, eventually, the dog is satisfied he has secured the farm and retreats down the trail. I cut back to the trail and make my way back to Humahuaca.

I’m tired and running low on water, and the way back up seems longer than I remembered. The road is fairly deserted until I reach a wider dirt road on which perhaps a dozen trucks and tourist vans pass me in a couple hours. As I near town I encounter Quechan women tending their goats hemmed in by thick walls of briar. I meet my friend, Fabian, on the road back to the hostel. He spent the day in Jujuy to fix a credit card problem. We talk a bit, him practicing English, me Spanish. I decide on my next destination, Iruya, a pueblo even smaller and more isolated than Humahuaca, as much as that strains the imagination. Its an 80 km trip over mountain passes and down a narrow, cliffside, road.

The others return to the hostel from a trip to the Bolivian border. Not much to see there, they inform me. To no avail, I try to stoke up the hostel califacion, so I take a much needed, but freezing, shower and get a good night’s rest.