¨A Blog¨ - San Pedro de Atacama, 2009

I´m in the desert!

I am so excited about this. I don´t know what has happened to me in the last few years but I seem to have developed a fierce love for all things Western. Not Western like McDonalds and anorexia but Western like Hank Williams and people flying out of saloon windows. (I still haven´t watched any Westerns, though, I don´t think. Is The Three Amigos a Western? Cracking film.)

Consequently I am happy - nay, ecstatic - to be rompin´ about in the Wild West! Well actually I am about five minutes away from a Chilean-Argentina border crossing, but SP de Atacama is West of Argentina at least so it is sort of Western. As Ro wrote yesterday, the bus drive was just stupidly amazing. Offensively excellent. It wasn´t just one type of your generic Amazing Desert Imagery, either. It changed from one marvellous desert cliché to the next. I am frankly surprised that we did not encounter Road Runner/the Little Prince. We did encounter: llamas with pom poms on their heads; a man in a wide-brimmed hat leading two donkeys from one arid and isolated location to another for no apparent reason.

Also I should point out that despite my joy at being in the desert, I have been in sort of a grumpy mood this morning and all I have done today is: eaten eggs on bread; drunk 2 cups of tè canela (black tea with cinnamon, quite tasty); read about 200 pages of Jude the Obscure, which is a book by a Mr. Thomas Hardy. I´m really enjoying it, it´s just getting to the sexy bit, but Jude is such a sad gentleman! Is there any hope for happiness for him? Not according to the blurb, so thanks a lot for the spoiler PUBLISHERS.

Anyway what I was going to say is that the desert is a mixed bag of treats. On one hand it is stunning, what with the huge sky and the big white moon that rises in the day and the adobe huts and all, ooh and tonight there is a FOLK MUSIC festival! (I´ve discovered the hard way that folk music here doesn´t necessarily mean croaky-voiced bearded Jesus lookalikes in cowboy shirts so much as it does grinning men bellowing out vibrato-heavy odes and strumming instruments in a silly sort of way, but it is tremendously enjoyable regardless.) But on the downside it is really hot. Actually it´s a nice sort of hot, not humid or anything, and it´s very easy to cool down once you´re indoors, but it does make doing things kind of difficult. For instance this afternoon we were all set to hire bikes and ride out to an oasis pool where one can go swimming and such. But it´s flipping CLOSED! Not just today but for the season. Consequently the thought of riding bikes around seems potentially stupid/fatal. Plus there is the fact that it takes very little to get stupidly dehydrated. Last night I drank almost two litres of water before bed and I still woke up with a crusty old throat.

What´s more we are at 2400 metres. This is the point at which altitude sickness begins apparently, so while we shouldn´t be too bad yet it´s hard to tell if we´re dehydrated or have a spot of the mountain sicky. Ooh here is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject: ¨The town lies at an average altitude of approximately 2,400m (7,900 ft) and visitors often experience mild altitude sickness such as dizziness, lethargy and headaches.¨ That sounds about right. So we are having a lazy day.

It´s been a while since I blogged, hasn´t it? We´ve been having a lovely time. I really enjoyed Còrdoba; it´s a fine city. We went to some wonderful markets and found some A-grade restaurants. All nice and cheap. I bought some excellent (silly) earrings. One of them is a treble clef and the other says ¨CARO¨. Relevant!

After Cordy we caught the nightbus to Salta. Salta is a funny sort of place. About 450 000 people. It has a rather more chaotic feel than the south of Argentina. And the traffic is wacky. Also it is hell of cheap, which is nice. We suspect this is because it is getting close to the old Bolivia - Lonely Planet says the same about Jujuy, which is even closer to the border. But it also has some knockout churches - I say this as someone who is infrequently thrilled by churches - and wonderful plazas. Ro and I spent a delightful 20 minutes paddling a little boat around a scungy old lake filled with ugly geese. It was a good time! We also got our tourist on and climbed the 1070 stairs to the top of Cerro San Bernardo (I managed to irritate Ro by counting them.) By golly it was a lovely sight, so much prettier than Cerro San Cristobal in Santiago - more like Smogiago. Oh ho ho. It was fantastically green and full of exotic and exciting trees (not baobabs, I don´t think, but something with swollen trunks and pears?), and all sorts of interesting diversions - an outdoor ¨gym¨ with poles and rings and benches and stuff, and a playground, and a waterfall and a big old Jesus. Then we caught the cable car down! It was truly a joy.

Right, I think Ro plans to post again shortly so you should be well and truly sated with blog posts in the interim. I think I will try to post more frequently, I´ve been lax of late.

Loooooooooove
Lion