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Published: October 2nd 2011
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We headed wast. Towards the mountains, through fields and farmland. We spent the day driving through Western NSW – or its doppelganger at least. Stands of gum trees as windbreaks, flat fields, grain silos, farmers in trucks, billboards advertising tractors and agrochemicals....only the billboards were in Spanish and the utes were on the wrong side of the road. But looking out the window as the sun set, the reddish glow of the dying sun flickering through the roadside stands of gum trees, one could have been forgiven.
Once in Córdoba we made our way to the Hostel Aldea. Not too bad, a bit big with plenty of backpackers types. It was a bit odd, and a little out of the centre. At one stage in its life it was either a school or a mental asylum – strange long corridors, institutional looking rooms that had been given the fippie-backpacker treatment. It had a good common room, and a couple of different rooftop terraces. It was also close to a fair few decent
parillas, (steakhouses basically) so we took advantage of one of these when we arrived. As I always say, never eat anything bigger than your head – we gave
it a try.
Córdoba had an extensive area of pedestrian streets, and it made for an excellent place to walk around and look for a new set of headphones, these being essential for extended bus travel. A nice town, with decent coffee, and good enough to spend a day in looking around.
A short
colectivo ride away from Córdoba was the little town of Alta Gracia, and this was where Ernesto Guevara de la Serna – better know as Ché - grew up and spent his childhood. We had been to his birthplace – Rosario – the day before on the bus. That is, the overnight bus had stopped at the town's terminal for a second and we wearily opened our eyes and glanced around.
Amusingly, as we sat on the colectivo, a group of American girls began spouting right-wing talking points about Bolivia – one of them had been there, and it was all 'Socialism is TEH EVIL' and 'the people are poor because they don't work hard enough' and other such nonsense. Oh well, if there were no stupid people there'd be no smart people, I figured.
Then, minutes later.... “Isn't it, like, so
cool that we're actually going to Ché's house? Where he, like, lived? I so admire him.” Ahh, the young and ill-informed.
We had a look at Ché's house ourselves. It is now a museum, and worth a visit. In it, among other things, were the Norton 500, (or at least a replica) made famous in the Motorcycle Diaries, his garden shed, and copies of the recipes he used to cook - yellowed newspaper clippings taped to a wall. We snapped a photo in the hopes of keeping the instructions – some of the dishes sounded downright tasty.
For a feed we stopped at the café next door to Ché's house, and it was excellent. It was owned by a friendly couple - an Argentinian poet and performer, and his Cuban wife. They had met he was while living and working in Cuba. He lived in Cuba for 10 years where he was in a band and won some sort of award – there were some great photos of him and Fidel on the wall.
We had spotted the café – it sort of looked closed, but we were hungry. We stepped in, and were instantly greeted by
the friendly bearded poet. The first thing was to find out where we were from – they had a tally on the wall going back 5 years or so – we were the 136th and 137th Australians to have come into the café in five years. The café served Cuban food – we were admittedly a little dubious about this, having been to Cuba and eaten the food.
The food turned out to be great, and the poet was happy that we'd been to Cuba and liked it. He also had some of his cds for sale – we declined – odd spoken word over some slightly discordant Spanish style guitar.
Back in Córdoba and the Europa League final happened to be on, so I watched that while Klaire had a nap.
Then, we tried to get out of Northern Argentina.
We wanted to avoid the backpacker trail, if possible, for just a little while. We had a preference for smaller towns, and a desire to see places not everyone goes to.
Attempt to do this and you often run up against the unavoidable – there is a reason people don't go there. Sometimes that
reason is that it's awesome but they haven't heard about it yet. More often though, it's simply that there's not really anything there. We eventually wanted to head to Salta, but didn't need to hit the usual suspects before that. What followed was a strange few days of non-touristy towns and weird bus timetables.
We rocked up to the bus station. It happens that almost all the buses come from Buenos Aires, stop in Córdoba to pick up people, then continue. This meant that all the buses arrive pretty late and get to their destinations at inconvenient times – trying to find a hostel at 3 in the am is not my idea of a good time.
We had decided to go to La Rioja. No can do. At least, not with a but that arrives at any other time than 3 in the morning. So we switched, on the spot, to Catamarca – a place we knew absolutely nothing about.
The town itself seemed actually pretty nice – the only hiccup being the truly terrible hostel we had booked into (well, truth be told, that I had booked into). The cab driver had given us a
slight clue when, on the way there, he asked politely who had recommended it to us, and if they liked us.
No booking, and no rooms. When we walked in the bloke at the desk actually looked shocked. He took us to see the room they did have left – there was a bed frame with no mattress in the centre of the room, and, in one corner, a mattress covered with rubbish. We politely declined. Wandering the darkened streets we found another one, not quite as bad, and got a couple of beds in a dorm. We decided to stay only a night, then go to the bus station early in the morning to go to Salta.
No bus to Salta until 11 30 that night. A 14 hour wait at the bus station wasn't high on our list of things we wanted to do this year. We decided to go to Tucuman (San Miguel de Tucuman for short) – half way. We knew little about it, but its name was big on the map. As the capital of its province it was sure to have a few options. It's a big place of 800,000 so we
figured there would heaps of buses to Salta from there.
There wasn't, so we had to stay the night.
And, Tucuman was actually not bad. It had a decent square, some nice architecture, and tiny doctors. We bought a ticket for Salta at the bus station for first thing in the morning, and tried to find a place to stay. The first place we tried was full, so we found the sort of place we love – an anonymous, cheap, basic, clean businessmans' hotel – the King Hotel. Honestly, the puppydog, faux-hippy friendliness of every second hostel can get a bit much after a while. It was good to kick back in a simple room with a bathroom, telly, and a bored but friendly bloke at the check in for once. And as near as we could tell we were some of the very few gringos in town. While there we learned the reason that so many hotels had been full in the area – the Argentine round of the WRC.
We'd been trapped for a while in Northern Argentina. I imagine there would be worse places.
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