Fuddland

This category is a subcategory of Travels.

One of the [many] highlights of my holiday was the afternoon we spent visiting a series of stunning rock formations just outside Cafayate.

Los Castillos — The Castles.

[View the entire collection of rock formation photos in the Flickr set.]

Day four

As had become expected by now, leaving Roberto’s home was not a simple matter of waking up shortly before our scheduled leaving time, packing up and jumping on the horses — for one thing, our guide Horatio discovered that the horses had wandered rather farther than he’d anticipated during their rest day, so Jo and I sat around for three hours with absolutely nothing to do whilst Horatio enlisted his friends from down the mountain to get the horse back. This was particularly frustrating as he had been up and about for at least two hours before we emerged from our tent, and didn’t use his time effectively; his lack of experience was beginning to grate, especially given the quite considerable [for Argentina] amount of money that we were paying him.

Read the rest of “Out of the Yungas — days four and five”…

Meet Roberto, our gracious and very friendly host for days two and three of our trek. He lives deep in the forests of the Yungas, in a very muddy and quite steeply-inclined clearing. All of his accommodation is constructed from the trees that grow all around, and consists of four huts: one for sleeping, one for cooking, and two for storage. He was tremendously excited to have visitors from another country staying with him, and made a real effort to show us how he lived. Within minutes of us arriving I had been given a hot drink made from boiling the blossoms of a nearby tree — a traditional pick-me-up, I was told. Unfortunately I can’t report on its effectiveness since he laced it with so much sugar that I can’t be sure it wasn’t just that which got my blood flowing again.

Read the rest of “Into the Yungas — days two and three”…

For five days my friend Jo and I trekked up and down the mountains from the east of Ticara, heading southwards towards Jujuy [pronounced choo-chooey, with the ch as in loch], led by our Spanish-speaking guide, Horatio.

We started early on the Tuesday morning — scheduled for a six o’clock start, but our guide was about half an hour late turning up with the four horses. We learnt as the week progressed that this was the norm; whatever time we were told we’d be setting off, the actual hour of departure was no sooner than thirty minutes later than stated. After fifteen or twenty minutes of trotting along on our horses we’d left the town and begun to ascend the west side of the mountains, the landscape being largely rock-strewn, fairly barren, but quite beautiful in its own way, and very warm as the sun rose high in the sky. We stopped for a simple lunch at one of the more level regions, gazing at the stunning views.

A short time after lunch we had reached the summit and started to descend; for whatever reason, the clouds from the east do not generally rise high enough to travel up and over the mountains, and instead sit quite happily on this side, so we were now trekking down into cold and misty — and subsequently much more fertile — valleys. I found that I enjoyed the afternoon more than the morning; not only do I prefer being too cold to being too hot, but at many points we had to dismount and lead our horses along the mountainside pathways, because it was too dangerous to ride them — either it was too steep, or the path too precarious and we risked being thrown if the horses slipped. Great fun!

At the end of a very long day — twelve hours of trekking, all in all — we arrived at our first night’s lodging: the remote home of a family of five [plus their lamb, cat, and some chickens], friends of our guide. It consisted of four or five small buildings, with loosely-fitting stone walls and straw- or corrugated iron roofs. The family were quite quiet — the young children in particular — but this had a lot to do with the language barrier, and Jo managed a bit of small talk here and there. She soon had the oldest boy demanding that she take more photos of him and the surroundings because he loved to see the instant results on her digital camera’s screen.

After a simple but welcome dinner of potatos, goats’ cheese, and a lamb-based soup, we were shown to our sleeping quarters — two sleeping bags on the floor of the storeroom — and soon after dark we settled down to sleep in our cold but dry accommodation.