Day 82: November 4, 2007 In Salta

  Salta, Argentina
Sunday, November 4, 2007

Day 82: November 4, 2007 In Salta

We spent a lazy morning in the apartment-lazier for Elena than for me. I wrote while she slept in. Around noon, we loaded up our laundry and caught a cab to the lavandería. After dropping our load off, we walked toward Jovi for lunch. I'd noticed another restaurant on Rivadavia between 20 de Febrero and Balcarce on previous walks. We stopped to try it. It is called El Estilo and specializes in seafood. They have a surprising variety of dishes. At first this seems odd, being so far from Buenos Aires but we are really only a 300-400 km from the Pacific. We ordered salmon. It was quite good. I'm sure it came from Patagonia, much farther away.

We took a cab to supermercado El Norte and did some grocery shopping. The checkout woman really liked our Chico Bags, saying that she had seen several other people using them-undoubtedly Jorge and Bernardo. I told her I'd give her one next time I came down.

It took almost half an hour to get a cab back to the apartment-Sunday afternoon syndrome. After we put things away, I went down to the office. I was able to get into my network files but still had not received any email. I sent a message to the IT Help Desk but didn't know if they would actually get it so I sent a copy via Facebook to Jay Trussell, one of the computer guys at Brevard. I spent the afternoon working on the proposal. Around 8:00, I checked my email and was receiving again. There was a note from Rob Rodier that suggested that IT was unaware of the email problem prior to my note.

Elena had gone back downtown to hang out with friends. When she returned at 9:45, we cooked hamburgers. I was stymied, for the first time ever, in my effort to open a bottle of wine by a cork that refused to budge. Jorge tried it too. At first he could not get it out but, eventually, he succeeded. The three guys stayed up until midnight while Elena retired around 11:00.

El Paso de Llamas

The wine bottle incident reminded me of a day in 1987. I was doing fieldwork in the Campo de Talampaya, La Rioja with Daniel Malizia and Guillermo Re, both were graduate students at the University of Buenos Aires. Daniel suggested that we drive to the low water gap between the Campo de Talampaya and the Bermejo Valley to the west. The Río Bermejo cuts through the rising mountain at a place called Paso de Llamas, about 15 km west of the town of Pagancillo. We were using the UBA Unimog, a powerful Mercedes Benz truck with a zillion gears to go anywhere. Daniel had been there before and drove the Unimog over a faint track. We came to the river, which was only a few meters wide and a few centimeters deep. The front end sank into the mud and the engine conked out. He cursed that this was the same place he got stuck the last time he was there! Ordinarily, this would not be a problem in the Unimog but we could not get the engine restarted. We decided to check out the pass to see if we could find any volcanic ashes in the sedimentary strata, our reason for going there. Luckily, I spotted a 1 cm thick bed that we successfully collected. (It later gave an age of 15+ million years.)

Happy with our success, we returned to the truck to try to get it started. It wouldn't go. We gave up after an hour. Daniel and Guillermo decided to walk back to Pagancillo and find a mechanic to help us out. I elected to stay since they could walk faster and I would only slow them down.

With little else to do in the hot midday sun, I set up my tent and took a siesta. The sun was arcing downward when I awoke a few hours later. It was still an hour or so before sunset when I heard voices in the distance. Daniel, Guillermo, and an overweight mechanic stumbled into sight a few minutes later. They had driven out in the mechanic's car but it broke down a couple of kilometers before reaching the truck. He decided to rescue his clients before attending to his own vehicle.

The mechanic got right to work, quickly finding the problem. He had the engine started within 20 minutes. To extract ourselves from the mud, which was up to the axle of the front wheels, we resorted to the winch mounted on the front of the vehicle. We tunneled through the sand under a large an extension of the sandstone outcrop on the bank and snaked the cable through the hole. We buckled it closed and started the engine, standing well back in case the cable snapped. The line pulled taunt. A three-ton portion of the outcrop broke but the cable stayed wrapped around it. Slowly the unimog emerged from the mud and pulled itself up onto the riverbank.

Elated, we struck my tent and piled into the back of the truck. It was a moonless night in the desert and the southern hemisphere sky was aglow with the Milky Way. We drove the few kilometers back to the mechanic's car. He tried for an hour to fix the problem using a flashlight but the shadows it cast obstructed his view. He had blankets in his car and we all had sleeping bags so we decided to sleep under the stars. I climbed into the back of the unimog and dragged out our damajuana of red wine--a damajuana is a five-liter bottle of vino comú--and brought it out to drink with the food we had... no corkscrew. I had lost my Swiss Army knife with a corkscrew the year before and made the mistake of replacing it with the non-alcoholic variety.

We started carving at the cork with my knife, excavating about half of the cork. We pushed the remainder into the bottle. The four of us sat around the campfire for an hour passing the jug around. We downed about half of the bottle before rigging a substitute cork. I threw my sleeping bag out on a nearby sand dune, crawled in, and wriggled my body in the sand to make the sand conform to my body contours. It was extremely comfortable. I stared at the incredible sky for awhile and gradually dozed off.

In the morning, the mechanic quickly repaired his car and we exited the desert. He invited us to his home in Pagancillo for biscuits and mate. After our breakfast, we drove north to Villa Unión and got a room at the hostería so we could take showers before continuing northward to our next site, in Vinchina, 90 kilometers to the north.