I´ve been sucking on coca leaves for the past two days. Illegal apparently, which makes all the store signs indicating Coca for sale, along with a helpful leaf to distinguish it from Coca Cola, somewhat confusing.
But I´ve not hit bottom, and I´m not crawling in the street begging for more. It was medicinal....really. Sticking a few coca leaves in your cheek helps to ward off altitude sickness, headaches, etc. It also helps with digestion and numerous other maladies, apparently.
I´ve been touring the country around Salta for the past couple of days, going from 1200 metres to 4200 metres or so and back within a few hours...spectacular! The Tren a Las Nubes (Train to the Clouds) no longer runs, so I took a bus instead on a similar route that included pre-Inca ruins at Tastil, llama, donkey, and ostrich sightings, cactus forests, the Quechua town of San Antonio de Los Cobres, spectacular salt flats, a summit of 4,170 metres, and amazing scenery. Over 3,000 metres, even the cacti give up, so the environment is brutal and unforgiving...probably a lot like the outback in Australia. It´s very strange how foreign it all is, yet only a few hours away from a big city.
Good party trick that I learned from the guide (along with her dispensation of the coca leaves and instructions on how to use them): when you are about to go down 3,000 metres in about 30 kilometres, put the cap back on an empty plastic bottle. About 20 kms later, the bottle starts to squish a bit. At the bottom, the bottle is having a really bad day. (The same applies to tires, which can be a problem...more on that later).
Yesterday, I headed off to Cachi, a little village not very far away in kilometres, but 4.5 hours away once you throw a big mountain in the way. Along the way was Parque Nacional Los Cardones which was very cool...think flat prairies, but instead of wheat or canola crops as far as the horizon, Cardones (Cactus) instead. The things only grow 1 cm per year, so are hundreds of years old. New info: cardone cacti are a source of wood that is apparently as strong as iron, and used for rafters, doors, ceilings, window frames, etc. I did not know that.
I tried without success to book a couple of trips on roads that appear on maps, but are apparently too dangerous to use. Considering the safe roads that are used everyday to get out to some of the sites, a dangerous road must be really nasty or just plain not there in places. In the high altitude plains, one good wind would obliterate the road. In the mountains, a little rain creates landslides and rivers on the road. Summer - the rainy season - is therefore brutal for the tour companies as a little bad weather can have a huge impact (see my next post...camping at the YPF).
I am not going to get north to Jujuy and Humahuaca, which is a little disappointing, but I am out of time. My 2 - 3 days planned for Salta has turned into 5, which has been great, but I have to start heading east now. Tomorrow, at 5:00 (IN THE MORNING!) I take off on a very long trip to Iguazú, the big waterfalls at the north east corner of Argentina, on the borders with Brazil and Paraguay. I´ll get there about 26 hours later, 7:30 am, Saturday.
