the northern mountains

humuahuaca..............................................................

iruya.........................................................................

san isidro..........................................................................

well, as if one post in a day wasn´t enough, i will continue while i am on a roll....

leaving salta, i headed for the northern mountains to a town called humahuaca. it´s one of a string of little towns in a valley in the northernmost part of argentina, right by bolivia. it resembles the southwest a lot, with the red rocks and scrub brush. think northern new mexico and southwestern colorado. i met up with dani, and ended up camping for a couple of days by the river. it was great to be outside and with argentinians. it took a while, but i´m slowly getting better at understanding them. it´s an interesting brand of spanish, although they call it castellano, and they love using the zha sound, kind of like italian, i think. it´s a beautiful language, though, and the people have a really strong sense of community, and they rally around their food and music, and especially their mate, which are all really good. the food, empanadas and bbq meat(asados) and the music is called chacarera and zamba, to name a few. they have not had the best of luck with politics, and it seems that in places where the government is consistently corrupt and oppressive, the people unite and develop a very strong sense of who they are. think ireland, which also has not had the best of luck of many centuries..
it was great, though, as i got to play a ton of music and started learning my first chacareras. after humahuaca, dani left and had to go to the beach to work, and i continued on with some of his friends farther north to a town called iruya. it´s some 53km in a schoolbus with luggage on top, crossing over rivers and up and down mountain passes where no school bus in it´s right mind should be. they do it all the time, though. iruya is a tiny little town built on the confluence of two rivers. from above it reminds me of pictures of european towns i´ve seen, with small winding cobblestone roads, and houses all crammed in together. situated in a tiny little valley, it has mountains rising up on all sides some 3000 feet, pretty much straight up. the town itself is somewhere around 9-10000 feet. we ended up staying here a couple of nights and i held the first squaredance, most likely ever, in this town. we were playing music in the hospedaje and folks were dancing the chacarera, and someone got the notion that they wanted to go to the main plaza and learn to squaredance. hmmm....it was great, though. i taught them the virginia reel, and they absolutely loved it. it was funny, though, for they all stopped about halfway through saying that it was too much of a workout. i also got to learn the chacarera, which is their traditional dance here. it´s a really cool dance, meant to imitate condors, their largest bird of prey here. it was great fun, and afterwards we passed around the guitar playing their songs and me playing old country tunes. it´s funny the requests you get down here. they love the house of the rising sun and blowing in the wind.
from iruya, we hiked 7km up a river valley, continually crossing over the river up to a town called san isidro. an even smaller town, there were power lines running to the town, but they weren´t working at the moment, so candles were the light at night. it is a private community in an even narrower valley perched up on a cliff overlooking the river. the people were so very friendly and i got to play for a bunch of them. it was a nice spot to sit and write and practice my music. hopefully when i return i´ll have a body of tunes that i have written. either way i spent a couple of days hiking above the town to the most incredible fields and valleys. it´s great, too, cause there are donkeys everwhere. every so often you hear the wonderful sound of the donkey fill the valley. i swear i will always die laughing to the bray of a donkey. even the sight of one reminds me of the movie shrek and cracks me up. them and the horses just wander through the mountains grazing and just hanging out. every so often i guess they´re rounded up. i´m not really sure. it was good fun, though and i got to sit on top of the world it seemed and play my fiddle....very dorky, i know, but you know how i roll.
after a couple of days and a day of some serious rain, i am now back in iruya for the night and will begin my trek back south to salta for the carnaval. things are good, and hopefully the same for you...oh, and you would think that after 27 years i would learn to bring sunblock. man oh man i have gotten some sunburn here..