Backdated from Thursday, April 21, 2005 1am-ish (mined from paper journal.)
Inti Tampu Hospedaje, Tilcara, Jujuy, Argentina.
p Andres was waiting for me at the station in Tilcara, as arranged.
For some reason, he was expecting me to be blonder, and Swedish.
We went in his car almost straight to his family´s hospedaje, which he
had somehow failed to mention when he told me he could ¨arrange¨ cheap
accommodations, stopping only briefly at the tourism office, which he
suspiciously seemed not to want me to enter. $15 pesos for a room
with a shared washroom, $25 for a private baño, he quoted me
Fair
enough, but when I mentioned a hostel I´d heard about, thinking I
might prefer the ambience of a youth-filled hospice, he said ¨Malka?¨
and I conceded, to which he responded that it was very expensive, like
$60 pesos/night.
This set off my bullst detector, so as soon as I´d unloaded my bags
and made myself an avocado sandwich with the near-last of the
multi-flavoured mini-breads I´d bought in Jujuy, I vetoed the
directions I´d been given to the laguna and marched towards the
centro, and then hiked straight up to the Malka hostel, following the
clearly marked signs I saw soon after turning onto San Martin, one
block over.
The first guy I approached turned out not to be the dueño, but rather
a French tourist, one of a rather large group of francophones with
whom I soon found myself talking and drinking wine. However, I take at
least an hour of immersion when thinking in Español to regain any
level of French fluency, and my ¨frespanglish¨ was creating some
communications challenges with the mainly non-Spanish-speakers, which
combined with the sense of earlier deception to inspire loneliness for
the first time, really, since I´d been on the road.
In hopes of some sort of (homesickness?) remedy, I opted to follow a
single French traveller to a restaurant in the centre where she was
apparently meeting up with a single (French-)Canadian traveller for
dinner at the Sueñadoro(?). There were two other tables of mixed
foreigners and another two with Porteños (i.e., people from Buenos
Aires). In fact, the entire dining population must have been tourists
who came to hear the advertised folk music act, which didn´t end up
coming on until after we´d eaten. I left my e-mail with the
French-Canadian, who said she may have some translation work for me in
the future, and an American at the next table, who wasn´t sure of her
travel plans either.
By the time I got back to Inti Tampu, any thoughts I´d entertained of
moving to the hostel (which, I´d discovered, was charging between $14
and $20 pesos/person, not $60!!) was overshadowed by the awkwardness
of the social situation it would create, the promise of a better
excursion-filled next day, and an overwhelming fatigue.
