Tilcara to Tupzia
Added on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
The Tropic of Capricorn.
Note 1: My new friends in Carlos Pas make me so welcome I do not want to leave. So often the desire to stay fights hard with the need to move. This is what gives a journey more completeness. Moving is only made beautiful when there is also time to stay. Anyone can just move, the secret is what to do when the moving stops. Perhaps travelling could be compared to eating a good meal, well worth the effort to find, but all the better to rest and assimulate the food once it’s been eaten. Today I have indigestion. I have eaten to much travel. Had my fill of moving. While the sun was still high I fell upon the small village of Tilcara and rode slowly up a narrow poorly paved street to park beside a café which had an air of familiarity. Gentle music drifted from the cool interior, whilst walls of colour and indigenous textures suggested calmness. Down the street, school children, all dressed in crisply pressed white shirts and blouses, empty from their classrooms to make their way home. Over the way a small market square is full of traders selling hats and brightly coloured woven goods. Beside me an old man sits. We speak and he introduces himself as Rodolfo. He says he is a poet. Unable to sit I stand uncomfortable with this early finish to an otherwise productive day. The indigestion is in my head. Rodolfo suggests a place to stay and after a coffee I ride up this narrow street to the base of mountain side burnt brown by the heat of a summer that has not yet been replaced by a spring.
Note 2: Leaving Argentina is not difficult. Customs and passport control are integrated with their respective counterparts from Bolivia and both sets of officials deal with entry and exit procedures together. The stamping of passports and flourish of important signatures takes minutes, and soon I ride across the bridge that spans the dry gulch, which separates these two friendly countries. Up the road a policeman who demands 5 Bolivianoes for my peage ticket stops me. It is a road tax that will in some way contribute to the building of one. The policeman tells me to be careful, that there are bandits. That there are men with guns and I must not stop.
“Es pocito pelligroso,” I say, “or mas pelligroso?”
“Pocito,” he says, “but on no account ride at night.”
The road is a dirt track with corrugations. After riding across the Nubia and then the Didi Gugalu Desert, this track is gentle by comparison. The sun is low and the shadows cast are long. I am over 3600 metres and climbing. The vegetation is stunted by the altitude. There are no trees, no buses, just the most wonderful views of the Cordillera on which this part of Bolivia is built.
Small villages appear as if they have grown from the earth and some buildings have begun to return. Cornices and walls with gaping holes. They look uninhabitable but that word has no meaning out here, as families walk out of a dark place and then back into another one. There are no bandits. A few truck drivers. The very old. Children. No one with guns. People washing in manky streams. No birds. Yet in the dark, a few miles before the town of Tupiza, the highest vertiginous rock faces silhouette against a blue-black night sky to give such majesty that I have to stop and stare. Tunnels lit by the bike’s lights are almost a piece of poetry in motion. I find a hotel, something to eat, an internet café and go to sleep.
