Pleasant towns, painted desert

---

---

Humahuaca (pronounced HOOM-ah-walk-ah) is a small, dusty town of cobblestone streets laid out in a grid and it reminds me a little of San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. There's a bit of Inca-style construction at the base of the town hall - shaped stones fitted neatly together without cement - that's imitated less perfectly in many of the other low buildings. Town hall is a tall, white building with a bell tower that's beautifully lit at night.

Locals are mostly aboriginal or of mixed blood and as they're used to tourists they pay you little attention. The older men and women dress in traditional clothes - the women in wide skirts and sweater over shirts, the men in pants, shirts and often a vest. Nearly all wear broad-brimmed hats. Young people dress in contemporary clothes, carry cell phones, listen to MP3 players. They're a squat, wide people that get wider with age.

The town sits at 3 000 metres so it was cool in the evening when I went out to find a meal of llama stew and humitas, which are ground corn meal and quinoa, lightly spiced, wrapped in corn husks and steamed.

People come here to go trekking in the nearby hills or up to Iruya. It's a pleasant place but I was very short on time and stayed only overnight, catching the bus the next morning to Purmamarca (POOR-mah-mark-ah) where my goal was the Salinas Grande.

Purmamarca is very touristy and the central square is dense with tables full of blankets, clothing, beads, goblets marked “Purmamarca” or “Salta” and so forth. The village sits in a tight valley hemmed in by rough, amazingly colourful hills of orange, copper, red, green and mauve. The valley is fairly green while the hills are mostly just rocky with a few tussocks and cacti here and there.

I went up to Salinas Grande in a minivan with 14 others. It takes an hour to get there, driving through dramatic early morning scenery with mountains carved into ridges and gullies by the shadows cast from the morning sun.

Salinas Grande is a broad lakebed of snow-white salt, dried in small pans that collectively form large pans that as a whole form the lakebed. It stretches away for kilometres to pale brown hills at the horizon.

The van dropped us off at a low stone building out near the middle and I walked across the salt flats for about fifteen minutes to where sculptors sat at work, dressed against the sun's rays in long sleeves, long pants and facemasks. It wasn't cold but it wasn't especially hot, either because we were above 3 000 metres. They sat inside a roofless enclosure of low walls, carving in salt and etching on stone. The figures were mostly llamas done in very simply design as salt is not a material that allows for detailed carving.

Nearby ran rows of rectangular ponds, each pond a metre or so wide, two or three metres long and deep to mid-calf where the salt has been cut from the lakebed for use. The water is cold and pale blue. Each row of ponds was at least a hundred metres long, probably more. I counted seven rows but couldn't see if there were more further out.

There wasn't much else to see and little to do, so after an hour the group returned to the van for the drive back to Purmamarca.

---

Photos

View of hills
Purmamarcans live in a very colourful setting.

Snake road
On the way up to Salinas Grande.

In the salt desert
The better known one is at Uyuni in Bolivia, but this one was interesting, too.

Wrapped up
Sun is intense here, so the artisans sitting out on the lake carving things from salt cover up completely. Their hands are very dark from the sun.

Salt baths?
Not really. This is where they've dug out slabs of salt from the lakebed. Several of them running in parallel, they stretch a long way.

Comments

[Tara]

Very nice photos
I liked your site - found it by accident. I loved your photos. I very much enjoy taking photos of the locals when I travel about. Tara