Monday, January 10, 2011

The Tilcara Chronicles, Continued...

Hello again,

As promised, I'm back for more bloggery-pokery. It's taken me a while to get on a computer (a group of 11 Argentinian youngsters have taken over the hostel)... So let's just cut the crap and start up where I left off yesterday:


Wednesday  5th January 2011

I don't know how they do it, but Argentinians seem able to survive on 4 hours sleep a night. At least, they do when they are on holiday. So, despite going to bed sometime after 4, there was movement in the dorm from 8am onwards! Grrr... Still, I managed to resist the call to the toilet until nearly 10am, which was a victory of sorts. Me and my bladder! ;-) And, well, getting up wasn't made any easier by the persistant drizzle that was falling immediately outside the dorm (which opened directly onto the courtyard). And bejeezus, it was freezing (again, not literally, but I swear it must have dropped below 10 degrees, which for summer near the tropics, is rather nippy). So, anyway, I manage to cross the courtyard to the kitchen, where I find coffee waiting for me, which was much needed, as my tongue was a little bit furry and my head a little bit muzzy. I wonder why that should be? Could it be the drying effects of the mountain air? The lack of sleep? The Fernet consumption? I'm plumping for a combination of all 3...

Well, with said coffee in hand, I sit down at the breakfast table (among the crumbs and the flies - cleanliness is not one of the hostel's strong points), and start chatting to the guy (from Buenos Aires) who was already sitting there (why am I mixing the present and past continuous I wonder? Hmm - it must be a subconscious narrative device, in order to recreate the slight feeling of disorientation that comes with a hangover!!!). Anyway, there I was chatting away in Spanish, without self-conciousness, without too many pauses (that usually come whenever I'm hopelessly searching for the right word), and without misunderstanding the majority of what was said to me. I must have still been a little bit "under the influence" (after all, we all know that alcohol is a wonderful social lubricant, especially when dealing with a foreign language). Well, whatever it was, it felt good to be able to converse in Spanish, and I was thus motivated to spend the rest of the day thus, drinking tea and coffee and chatting away with all and sundry about the joys of the weather (maximum 12 degrees, rain on and off all day... could well be Sidmouth in the middle of winter!), the joys the United Kingdom (which seem easier to identify so far from home!), and the joys of travelling (which principally revolve around meeting such lovely people). What a hippy I've become! All positivity and light! The next thing you know I'll start enjoying the Folk Festival!!! [maybe it's just that Spanish is a more joyful language than English?]

The funniest thing (and most frequent topic of debate), was that everyone from Buenos Aires was convinced that the north-west would be boiling hot in summer (not taking into account the altitude and fact that it's the wet season). Therefore, they had all brought flimsy clothes, flip-flops and a soupcon of naivety with them to the mountains. Most of them were forced to wear their entire wardrobe (me included, actually - although I was unable to put on all 5 pairs of shoes!), or, in the case of one couple, get the bus to Bolivia in order to buy some cheap winter clothes there (actually, they found that they couldn't even wait that long... first they were forced to head to the local market in order to buy hats and gloves, in order to stave off hypothermia and survive the bus trip across the border!). I have to confess that even I (meteorology nerd and general know-it-all) didn't think that it would be quite that cold!

It was mid-afternoon before I left the hostel, and that was a fairly brief affair (in between showers), to purchase accompanying foodstuffs and wine for the evening's barbecued pig (well, part thereof - it was one hind quarter to be precise) extravaganza. It seemed like a good idea to join in the fun (everyone had been so sociable so far it would have seemed churlish to organise my own grub). But what a mistake that turned out to be!

We opened the wine at around 10pm, figuring that the pig had been cooking for over 2 hours and that a little aperitif would be nice before dinner. And it was, for the first hour or so...

... but 11pm came and went and still the pig wasn't cooked. The hands on my watch ticked on and on (they say a watched pot never boils... well, maybe watching a pig on a barbecue has a similar effect!). We waited and waited... getting hungrier and hungrier... the acid building in the stomach (red wine has that effect on me when it's not accompanied by food)... the irritability building all around. Come 2am (I joke you not) I started to become desperate. I had already eaten 4 bread rolls and half a packet of greasy crisps to stave off the hunger pangs. But it was just no good. I was going to have to take action. So, fork in hand, I jumped up from my seat, and headed over to the action. Thrusting the fork forward, I stabbed it into the potato salad and started eating it straight from the salad bowl. There was no other option left available to me. If I hadn't loaded forkful upon forkful of (crunchy) potato (even they weren't flippin' cooked), egg (thankfully they were cooked) and mayonnaise (from a large, squeezy plastic sachet thing, as is the norm here) into my mouth, I swear I would have either a) passed out or b) committed some kind of porcine attrocity. Thanks to the potato salad, the pig survived and my irritability diminished...

... feeling partially sated, I decided to give it a further 30 minutes, just in case some kind of "pigs-might-fly/pigs-might-be-cooked"-style miracle came about, but what with God being a muslim and all (according to, er, well, I'm not sure who actually, and please don't send me hate-mail as a result of this little joke, I don't wish to get myself into the same pickle as the now infamous Danish newspaper, so let's just forget I said anything about it, shall we?) - perhaps it just wasn't meant to be! The bloody pig (literally - it was still raw in the middle, after all) was never going to be cooked, and sometime after 2:30am I gave up waiting and went to bed...


Thursday 6th January 2011

... for a while, at any rate! It was another early start (do people have so much to do on holiday that they need to get up at 8am?)... and all we wanted to know was: did anyone survive until pork was on their plates (ooh, that has the ring of a nice new idiom, don't you think)? Well, (I can almost sense how much your breath is baited), the answer is: YES! At some time just after 3am, with people hallucinating from hunger, banging their cutlery on the table and chanting like they were part of some bizarre food-deprived cult (maybe this was just in my food-starved dreams!) the edges of the pig were carved and served to the famished, leaving a bloody middle for the vultures and the dogs (i..e anyone who decided to raid the fridge in the middle of the night)! It only turns out that they tried to cook the pig from frozen. Qué boludos!!! Cami - even you know that you can't cook a pig from frozen (don't you?) ;-)

Well, despite the lack of sleep, the combination of a lack of food and a reduced intake of alcohol had somehow put a spring in my step (it could be a new diet in the making... perhaps I should contact the Daily Mail). Anyway, I was bouncing around like a veritable space-hopper (well, I'm exaggerating a touch, perhaps [exaggeration-proneness is a genetic condition, after all], but at least I didn't feel totally knackered like the day before), so I decided to put the energy to good use and head out to take some photos. It was a glorious sunny morning (a bit too bright, actually). Tilcara looked lovely, in a dusty, weather-beaten kind of way. The rocks all around heaved skyward in various different poses (and hues), and all was rather lovely, actually.

As the heat of the day increased, I retired to the fly-filled sanctuary of the hostel, to cook some lunch (pasta alla mosca, anyone? Unfortunately there was no oven, otherwise I would have been tempted to cook Garibaldi biscuits! No need for any raisins!!!) and fortify myself for the afternoon's planned trek. A quick post-prandial snooze in the hammock followed (much more comfortable than the structureless foam-matress bunks), and I was all set. Suncream? Check. Two litres of water? Check. Wetwipes? Check. First aid kit? Check. Waterproof? Check. Fleece? Check. Spanish dictionary? Check. Mobile phone? Check. Nail clippers? Check. Dental floss? Check. I was ready for anything!

And what a lovely walk it was. Reasonably strenuous (on the way up at least) as the altitude must have ranged from two and half to three and a bit thousand metres. I took in the Garganta del Diabolo waterfalls, a lot of rocks and cacti and a remote farmstead/village, in a valley, high up in the mountains. Gorge(ous)! Once I got past the waterfalls there wasn't another tourist in sight. Just a woman and her goats (she looked approximately 206, but was probably only in her 30s - I guess that's what happens under intense mountain sunshine, although I'm not sure that explains the broken teeth) and another woman and her donkeys. She was bow-legged and laden with a fuschia-pink carry-sack (for want of a better description) and thus very photogenic. Indeed, it was all very picturesque/awesome (the original sense of the word, that is - I don't just mean fine/okayish in an American-stylee). I know, I could have used awe-inspiring instead, but I just want "awesome" to return to it's previous meaning. Please! C'mon dude, that would be just awesome, dontchathink?

Oh, forgot to say. At one point the sky turned black and thunder cracked all around. It was quite exciting in an apocalyptic-kind-of-way. Heavy drops of rain started to fall, and I thought: "shit, why did I decide to sramble down this ravine to take photos of a trickle of water?". Hmm... that'll be the Ashford genes, that will! ;-) Anyway, the rain didn't come to anything (phew) and the scramble back up was actually easier than the scramble down (luckily the Yvonne genes are equally strong and equip me with a sense of anxiety that prevent me from doing anything too gung-ho/kamikaze). So, in the words of the now infamous Lanzarote-returnees: I survived!

Nonetheless, I was rather tired when I got back (hence the haggard-looking photos), but still, I gallantly got into the social swing of things back at the hostel. This evening was all about redemption. After the big pig debacle of the night before, it was the turn of calzone (big knickers [i.e. a cross between a pizza and a pasty for those not in the know]) to make or break the hostel's culinary reputation. And well, whilst there won't be any Michelin stars flying around Tilcara anytime in the near future, it was a definite improvement on the night before. I actually had something warm to eat, for a start (!), and I have to say, despite a slight lack of salt, it wasn't a bad effort. It was washed down, as ever, with a nice drop of red, and, all told, the evening was a thoroughly pleasant one (although it ended somewhat prematurely [approx 1:30am] on my part, when I decided that at the age of 33 I was just too old to have a third successive 4-hour night's sleep, and thus called it quits while the others headed out to dance the night away).

Well, once again I have waffled on and on and on (and on [and on]), so I've exhausted myself prematurely. I therefore can't bring myself to write about Friday just yet. That will have to wait for a return of the energy and inspiration that preceeded this e-mail (and quickly petered out)... I need a cup of tea (yes, sadly, the inferior continental muck that we have to make do with outside of our blessed isles... but, you know, what can you do?)!

Until then, I will bid you farewell. By the way, thank you to those (few) of you who have updated me with your news. It is very much appreciated! :-) And to those of you that haven't, well... [insert disappointed silence for the length of time you feel is appropriate {quite long in some cases, I would imagine}]... I hope you feel suitably chastened and thus will be spurred into action. Come on you lazy buggers, if you're sufficiently un-busy to read this, then you're sufficiently un-busy to write me a quick e-mail. I thank you (in anticipation).

Take care dear friends (and people I don't even know, perhaps [looking at the stats, there must be some strangers reading this as I don't even have that many friends... well, unless you count Facebook, that is, which as we all know, doesn't really count in the friend-counting department].

Bye bye, adios, cheerio...
James xx

3 comments:

Sidmouthian said...

Why do I insist on proof-reading after I have published? Anyway, apologies for the over-use of the word "thus"! Please insert your own hences, ergos and therefores...

Sidmouthian said...

Is commenting on your own blog (when no-one else comments) really sad? And is it even sadder when no-one answers "yes"? Sadness be damned: I'm on holiday!

Vanesa Morán said...

ahahahaahha! Hey James, want to eat some pig in Rosario? :p