tucuman

so i left salta and headed for the city of santiago del estero. but....i got to tucuman and it was late and i didn´t want to head to a city and get there at night and well, blah blah blah....

so i made it to tucuman. it´s a pretty good sized city, and does quite a lot of commercial and business traffic within the country. it´s a good looking city with a beautiful main plaza and is pretty hot and humid in the summers. it´s surrounded by fields of sugar cane and is a nice green valley surrounded by mountains. i ended up calling a friend i had met up north camping and met up with him. he´s a great fellow..alejandro vaca, or la vaca...and he ended up giving me a tour on his broken down moto bike around the city. it was quite the adventure riding around on the back of something like that. no helmets, no traffic rules...it´s basically a rally race in the streets here with buses and cars and bikes and motos just weaving around each other trying to race to the next intersection to play chicken with the crossing traffic to see who goes first. there´s not really any stop signs either....

either way it was a wild weekend of discos and bbqs and swimming...there´s pictures on the site. the highlight was definitely the carnaval on sunday. it was the last day of the celebration, and it was held outside of town at a soccer stadium. they had bands playing all day and sold beer and food. the big carnaval aspect of it all was that they also sold packets of powdered paint....that you mix with water or beer and proceed to wipe it on just about anybody that walks by. it was just madness. add to that water being sprayed everywhere and fake snow...latin america is crazy. and awesome. it was a debaucherous afternoon and i was sufficiently covered in paint and a bit inebriated as well.

the lessons i learned from tucuman are...

one...i´m not 22 any more like my tucumano friends. staying out until 6 in the morning multiple nights in a row going to discos and chasing after parties...well. i guess i never really was into that, but especially not now.

two..latin america is crazy. there is a raw energy here that is unexplainable.

and now im in the central sierras of argentina in a quiet little village called la cumbre. it´s after tourist season, so it´s quite nice. getting to play lots of music and relax. and sleep.