Tilcara, Salta, Mirko and us

With a bit of regret, we said goodbye to Iruya–probably our favorite town that we visited on our little road trip–and retraced our steps up the winding road, over the mountain pass and back to the highway. We headed south through the Quebrada de Humahuaca, a high-altitude desert canyon with dramatically colored and shaped mountains.

Here are a couple of culled-from-the-Internet pictures to enjoy. (I swear we saw these exact same views and visualized the pictures looking exactly like they look, but just didn’t get around to actually taking them ourselves.)

We decided to make the picturesque town of Tilcara home for our last couple of days on the road, and, in a stroke of luck, met a guy who offered to rent us his weekend house in town for the equivalent of 20 bucks a night. His name is Mirko. (We actually took this picture.)

There was something about Mirko that was at first vaguely unsettling–why offer out of the blue while at lunch to rent us his house?  why the mustache?–though we later figured out he is just a really nice, gregarious guy.

We (well, mostly me) developed a rather involved story about us finding a French passport beneath the mattress, matching it to the face on posters plastered in the tourist areas around town and then coming upon a cache of other foreign passports somewhere in the house. I thought it might be fun–to sort of mess with the travel-blog genre a bit–to let the story and details develop, ever more ominously, over a couple of blog posts and then stop posting for about a week, but Jim thought that might not go over too well back on the home front.

We spent our time in Tilcara lazing about the house, drinking wine, enjoying the mountain views from the backyard, trying parillada–an Argentine specialty that gets you many different cuts of meat, including kidneys and intestines (“from lips to assholes”)–for the first time, and browsing the town’s outdoor bazaar.

Here I am thinking about which handcrafted earrings might look best on Jim: hoops or danglies? (We took this picture too.)

All was not gravy though, as the house had not been used in a while and so had to have the propane tank replaced, which was a long, complicated process that left us without heat or hot water for the first night. To keep warm we drank beer and tried our hand at making mash-ups by using a couple of iPods and exchanging one earbud from each. Upshot: we sucked.

After a couple of days in Tilcara it was time to return to Salta for our flight to Buenos Aires. Turning in the rental car went more smoothly than expected, the agency remaining entirely unaware of the extent to which we’d beat the thing to hell. Our flight left at about the same time as the visiting Argentine president’s, though we didn’t get a chance to see her.

Here is a picture we didn’t take of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Fancy, isn’t she?

- M