Iruya, Argentina

Over a week ago we spent some time in a tiny village called Iruya in northwestern Argentina. From the Quebrada Humahuaca, we decided to make a side visit to this isolated indigenous community six hours away in a neighboring canyon. About 900 people live around Iruya and there are two buses a day that connect the village to the outside, paved world. From the town of Humahuaca, we took a tiny old bus up the side of the valley to the east and down into the next canyon, called the Quebrada de Iruya. In order to get to the town of Iruya, the bus had to navigate a road that was mostly river, then crest a 4000-meter pass, cross the high plains, and finally descend the switch-backs that drop steeply into the dramatic canyon that shelters the town. The road was a little nerve-wracking, but the scenery was sublime. Here is a photo of the road from the high plains. The canyon is the hole in the mid-ground.These canyons that cut into the high-altitude plain look from above like sheer slices into the belly of the earth, reminding me of the inner canyon at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. From below, they look like vertical walls cutting the sky. Geologically, from what we could tell by observation, the high plain (or puna) is composed of sedimentary conglomerate that filled in ancient valleys around the high peaks. The canyons that cut hundreds of meters into the puna have been more recently eroded into the sedimentary valley fill as the entire area was uplifted.

The town itself is perched on top of a cliff on one side of the canyon bottom, on a terrace above the rocky, braided river bed. Here is a view down a small side-canyon, with the town in the foreground and the colorful, sedimentary canyon wall in the background.Luckily, when we arrived on the bus we were met in front of the church by an old Quechuan woman who was looking for lodgers. We slept in a room in the basement of her mud-brick and cement house. The town was very quaint and small, with rough cobblestone-paved pedestrian streets running up and down a steep hill. Later in the day, however, our image of the town changed when we saw all these young, Castillian-looking people in western dress with walkie-talkies, big trucks, and four-wheelers zooming around on the tiny streets. At first we though, are they volunteering for some event? No. Later we discovered that the town had been taken over by a movie production team of 150 people from Buenos Aires and the US. Yes, that´s right--a movie. All the hostels were full to capacity. Many of the bars and eateries were out of commission for their various "bases". The set crews had all this random furniture and things in the middle of the beautiful, cobble stoned, narrow streets. The entire rhythm of the town had been upset because so many of the townspeople were in the film as extras. Restaurants were closed, church service was postponed, markets and kioskos were open irregular hours, and everyone was busy moving random things all over the place and building concrete ramps for the filming cameras. Here´s a view down a beautiful little Iryuan street, filled with props:So the presence of the movie folks was anoying and definitely colored our impression of Iruya, which we really liked without them. The third day we were there we realized that all this fuss and money and a month of work by 150 people was not actually going to some full length art film, but instead to a commercial for the Guinness beer company. Yes, that´s right--a Guinness ad. We have realized in South America that television producers and advertisers have their sticky little fingers all over the globe, in the most beautiful and remote places of the world. When we were in Iguazú Falls they were filming some stupid reality TV show there by dropping red and blue plastic balls over the falls and having contestants paddle around in boats trying to retrieve them from the crashing waters below. In real life it looked so incredibly stupid, it made you want to cry. We later saw on television another reality TV show filmed at Perito Moreno Glacier in Patagonia, another wonder-of-the-world that we visited. You can´t get away from television, though we came close during our next adventure in San Isidro, a town without electricity or roads. Here is a photo of the grand finale shoot which we stumbled across after returning from a hike. They knocked all these old automobiles over like dominoes in the main plaza of Iruya. Pandemonium.To get away from the crazy Guiness folks, we took a couple of amazing hikes down the Quebrada. The first day we hiked down the canyon, trying to find a place called San Isidro based on some sketchy local directions. According to our guide book, San Isidro was an "unforgettable, breathtaking seven hour hike", but when we started out we didn´t really know if San Isidro was a town or a mountain or what. Iruya is the hub village for a network of other tiny indigenous Quechua villages that are connected only by treacherous foot and donkey paths, some along the river beds and others up and down and up through canyon after canyon and across the high puna. Some villages are over a full day's walk distant. Since the people who use the paths know where they are going, there are no signs or even clearly marked trails. After some backtracking, we ended up following what seemed to be the most used path. It left the river bed and led up a steep, switchbacking trail through beautiful, bright-red rocks, which looked to terminate in a sheer cliff. Here is a view down to the river:Here´s a photo taken from part-way up the side of the canyon, looking down into the river valleys. You can see Iruya at the far end of the canyon bottom, on the green terraces above the river. And me in my wide brimmed hat:We went up and up and up for a long time and finally crested the cliff onto the upland plateaus. In the following photo you can see the abrupt change in slope between the flat, gentle puna and the steep, erosion-carved canyon sides. Up on top here there were range animals, donkeys, horses, cows, goats and sheep, and a few small mud huts. We met a man near the top of the cliff, who told us that no, we were not on the trail to San Isidro (a village) . . . no, that trail is in the river bed and much easier . . . and that if we kept walking over this high land and then down into another canyon we would eventually get to the tiny village of San Juan. We didn´t have enough time to continue on to San Juan without more water and overnight gear, so we walked onto the puna for awhile, admired the euphoric feeling that the elevation and austere scenery endowed, then turned around. In this view of the puna, the straight line that you see in the back of the plateau is a rock wall, built to keep the livestock in this field. The other three sides of the field are protected by plummeting canyon walls, which the goats have enough sense to stay away from, I guess. I have no idea how people get to this spot of isolated pastureland.Up on the puna, we met a very interesting man who was walking back to Iruya from a small village named Rodeo Colorado where he worked. When we talked with him he was seven hours into a nine hour walk from work to town (he was carrying nothing but a liter bottle of fruit juice). We later saw him at the local comedor (eatery) for dinner and he explained to us that he works for three weeks straight building the donkey paths that connect Rodeo Colorado to another village, then has one week off. His family lives up on the puna a-ways beyond Iruya, so to commute from work to home he has to walk nine hours from Rodeo Colorado to Iruya (in and out of several canyons), sleep and eat there, then take a one-hour bus at six AM up the river to the base of the mountain where his family lives. Then he has a two hour walk up to the puna to finally make it home for his week off. (Later, when we were in San Isidro, we saw a work crew making a new path up a canyon cliff. Very hard and dangerous work, with shovels and pick axes, balanced above hundreds of meters of free-fall.) Here is one of the homes we saw up on the puma, a mud brick house and a stone corral for the animals:On our way back down the path, we got passed up by a string of pack donkeys being herded up the very steep trail. I was impressed that pack animals made it passed some of the washed away sections of the trail. We had to perch on the edge of a gravel cliff to let them pass. Although we were being pretty careful about where we put our feet amid the steep drop-offs and loose gravel, other people we met were much more used to the trail. Since it was Sunday afternoon, we met a school boy walking to school from a house or small village at least 4 hours walk away from Iruya. Some of the larger small villages have elementary schools, but for high school the kids from all the surrounding villages commute (on foot) to Iruya and stay in a dorm there for the week. Anyway, this kid was scurrying down the cliff-side, cutting switchbacks and leaping from gravel mound to jagged rock. He probably made it back to town an hour faster than we did, and he was carrying a backpack with all his school books in it. Here are the donkeys:--Naomi and Ryan