Argentina take three: no money, mo' problems
Argentina take three: no money, mo' problems
Nothing beats travel for escaping the birthday boo-hoos.
It was my birthday last week, feliz cumpleaños a mi! By the time you read this, I’ll have turned 35, an age which gives me license to write one of those predictable first-person articles my phone's algorithm spams me with. You know, featuring a picture of my wizened face staring out across a field, with a headline like: “I am 35 and unmarried; science says my fertility is falling off a cliff and that I may as well crawl into a hole and die… but I’m spending all my money on travelling because YOLO!”.
Don’t worry, this is not that piece (and I'm not planning to write it). But allow me an indulgent few paragraphs of musing, because it is my birthday, after all.
Birthdays are strange beasts. I don’t know many adults capable of reacting to the arrival of their own in a balanced way, year on year. There’s nothing like the looming presence of a birthday for triggering bouts of panic and hysteria (this precious day must be duly marked, but how?!) or apathy and depression (another year closer to death, etc etc).
I’ve always found birthdays a bit stressful. There’s too much pressure riding on them to have the Best Day Ever, too much attention and undirected energy. Eventually the balloon bursts, like it did at my fifth(?) birthday party, when Jessica D said she thought I was horrible, and I told her I hated her, then spent the rest of the afternoon in my room crying. Or when I had just started a new school in South Africa, aged seven, and I was so anxious about the tradition of singing Happy Birthday in assembly that I stood up too soon (some rival birthday girl’s name was called before mine) and I had to walk back down the aisle to my seat, mortified.
You see, I always want to celebrate my birthday, with what is hopefully a normal amount of excitement for anyone over the age of 12, but there's so much potential for failure, so many delusions of grandeur tied up in the day. In the past I’ve put so much pressure on myself to enjoy it, that when it comes to it and I’m a room of smiling friends, my instinct is to want to run upstairs and cry in my room all over again. Make of that what you will.
This birthday will be very different. I’m spending it in Asunción in Paraguay, which makes it a special one by default. It's sad that I'm thousands of miles away from all-but-one of the friends I’d usually be celebrating with, but hey, it sure negates the pressure of organising a party.
Travel makes perfect sense as a device for simultaneously celebrating a birthday and avoiding the stress of it. There’s a reason why every hotel buffet or resort restaurant meal comes served with an accompaniment of awkward-tourist-being-sung-to-by-group-of-waiters. That’s right: they’re running away from the birthday boo-hoos by spending it in a place where almost nobody knows them. I can highly recommend it!
This is not to say that the nagging feeling of needing to have the Best Time Ever has disappeared, even if I am around 10,000km away from home. By this point in my life, I do realise it’s complete madness to place so much expectation on a single day. But maybe it’s reasonable to still want to have a Really Good Time doing something special all the same.
This thought was confirmed to me just a few days ago, when Dave and I were staying on a very remote farm run by Mennonites (there’s a story for another day). Mennonites are Anabaptist Christians who don’t tend to celebrate events seen as individualistic, birthdays being a prime example. We had a lovely, if unusual time there, but I’d have felt pretty sad to have spent my birthday on the farm drinking beetroot juice instead of wine (really) and trying to ignore the occasion. Even in ordinary years when I’m not off backpacking, I like the nostalgia prompted by birthdays, the nice messages from friends and the general pause for reflection they trigger to think about all the brilliant things seen, experienced and achieved over the past year. And yeah, I really like cake and presents, too.
So I'll be spending this birthday sitting by a hotel pool and drinking cocktails in the sunshine. Jessica D won’t be around to ruin things this time.
Friends have asked me how much planning one should do before taking a big trip like this, or if I have any tips for doing so, but the truth is, neither Dave nor I planned anything much at all before landing on the continent 11 months ago. Taking a fluid approach to our route through Latin America obviously works well for two people who have a lax attitude towards planning and routine at the best of times, but when backpacking, quite often it’s essential.
The natural next step for us after Bolivia was to cross over into Paraguay, and we were keen to get there before the wet season began in earnest – usually around the end of September (or October, or November, depending on who you’re asking). Paraguay is one of the few countries in South America where your enjoyment and ease of travel really are dependent on the season: time it too early and you will experience daily temperatures of 48 degrees centigrade and higher; too late and you’ll be washed away with the rural roads during the bi-annual downpours. The sweet spot seems to be between July and early October (again, depending on who you’re talking to), which meant that despite my musing last week that we were loose, lost and limitless without a timescale, Dave and I realised that actually we should probably get a move on and head on over to Paraguay, STAT.
But with wildfires still raging across the Pantanal and half of the Bolivian sky seemingly coated in smoke, crossing the border to the east of Santa Cruz as planned suddenly felt tricky. We made a new plan to head south, spending a few days in Tarija for wine tasting and other fancy things, before continuing down to Jujuy in Argentina, making a little loop down through the Quebrada gorge and across to Asunción to begin our tour through Paraguay from there.
We’ve been to Argentina three times already on this trip: it was our first stop when we landed on the continent back in October 2023, and we loved it so much we ended up spending the best part of three months there overall. It’s the eighth largest country in the world, so really three months there barely touched the sides, but Argentina is definitely up there with my favourites – something about the culture, the food and wine, the excellently punctual buses and madly diverse landscapes. It’s is also the country where we met good friends: Sebastian, our Airbnb host in Bahía Blanca, with whom we’ve met up a couple of times since in different parts of the country) and Graciela, my wise and patient, no-nonsense Spanish teacher, who has also become a good friend. Dipping a toe back in for a week or two on our way over to Paraguay would certainly be no hardship.
The plan from Tarija was to take a bus down to the border at Villazón, but our research (ie, pacing around the bus terminal and Whatsapping various bus and colectivo companies) led us to discover that, inexplicably, all feasible transport options to the border and beyond left at night – meaning a midnight or 2am crossing followed by only a short bus ride on to our next destination, Humahuaca. The more I thought about it, the less appealing it sounded to have to arrive in a place at 4am with nowhere to go after a night of zero sleep. And so we did some more investigating, and learned that there were more frequent options going to the border town from Tupiza seven hours to Tarija’s west.
On Saturday morning we did our usual packing up of all our scattered belongings, said our goodbyes to Betty the bichon-frisé and hiked up to the main road to hail a taxi to take us to the bus terminal. But first we needed to get some cash out – just enough to last us one final night in Tupiza and hopefully have a bit leftover to change at the Argentinian border for emergencies.
Except when Dave fumbled with the ATM, the machine ate his card. We spent a good few minutes unsure of what to do – the cash point was attached to a petrol station, but the petrol station had no shop or office, it was really just a dispenser with a couple of attendants. While Dave settled in on the pavement with the usual stages of despair, anguish and grief he reserves so well for these occasions, I walked over to inspect a nearby shop that, from what I could make out, seemed to be selling only a single oxygen tank. In a last ditch attempt for help, I went inside to explain our predicament and to my suprise, the guy behind the counter replied in fluent English – it turned out that this man who sat behind a desk failing to sell a single canister of oxygen all day had studied for an MBA in Texas. His name was Andres, and he couldn’t have been more helpful, offering to call the bank for us to retrieve the card - though it being a Friday, he warned it was unlikely we’d get anyone to come out before the following week, if at all.
I’m pretty sure that Andres had a contact on the inside, because after a few failed attempts to get through on the customer services number he called a woman called Angela – whom he’d definitely dated at some point, judging by the flirty tone of the conversation – and by the end of the call he’d convinced her to send someone out to retrieve the card for us that same afternoon.
Even if the rumour was true and we could get Dave’s card back so quickly (and it seemed unlikely) it was clear we weren’t destined to make it to the border that day, so we trudged back to the Airbnb and told them to cancel the cleaner – we were back for another night with Betty. By now I was pretty convinced that Andres’s strange little shop was a front, that he was in fact Tarija’s most influential criminal and that he probably had no intention of selling air. Whatever his situation, he must have been bringing in some serious Bolivianos to CNC Bank because by the time we’d walked into town for a consolation drink, Dave’s card was ready for pick-up. What a result!
The following morning, Saturday, we began again. The bus to Tupiza was hellish, crossing over mountains once again on a dirt track designed to frazzle my vertigo. The heat was oppressive but the two elderly gentleman who sat behind me in their winter jackets refused to open their window when I asked them, so I spent the best part of seven hours sweating feverishly and falling in and out of a fitful, heat-induced sleep.
Tupiza is famous for being where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had their final showdown (did you know they made it to Bolivia?! I did not) but the town itself was as dead as the cowboys, as were my energy levels and enthusiasm. We found one restaurant open for dinner that advertised itself as vegetarian – great news for me – but it also served the most enormous steaks I’d seen in Bolivia, which was good news for Dave. Our hostel was functional enough and the scenery was impressive, but one night was plenty long enough to spend in Tupiza.
Sunday had to be the day we’d cross to Argentina, we were sure of it. And unlike Tarija, the transport situation from Tupiza to the border town was straightforward – we paid £1.50 each to sit in a cramped collectivo for a couple of hours and arrived by lunchtime.
Argentina’s trainwreck economy means visiting comes with added complications, but they are easily dealt with if you know how. The dual exchange rate (official and unofficial) means one does simply take cash out of an ATM in Argentina – at least not without getting a terrible rate (I wrote about this here). The official rate used to be about a third of the “blue rate” used by absolutely everyone else; these days it’s closer to two-thirds, but you’re still much better off getting a cash transfer via Western Union, which honours the blue rate, or close to it.
All this is to say, being Argentina aficionados, we’d set up a Western Union transfer to ourselves ready to pick up once we crossed over the border from Villazón to La Quiaca. Cash is king in Argentina, and we would need it for our bus onwards to Humahuaca, and everything else thereafter. But we realised, sitting on the pavement by the two little shipping containers housing customs and immigration, that on Sundays all the Western Union branches in La Quiaca were in fact closed. Bummer.
And so it was that Dave and I found ourselves checking in to Villazón’s premium number one-rated hotel, Hotel Ideal (3.7 star Google rating; £20 a night) and marvelling at its orange walls, orange bed sheets, orange ceilings, and orange embroidered Hotel Ideal towels. Yes, the man behind reception had taken one look at our differing passport names and assigned us a twin room (quite a common theme in Bolivia) and yes, the twin beds were made up entirely of orange fleece – pillows, undersheet and all – but the Hotel Ideal really lived up to its name.
We strode back into town like kings and spent the last of our Bolivianos on shampoo sachets in the town’s sprawling market. Very little was open in this decidedly bleak border town on a Sunday, but we found an incongruous “Japanese” restaurant complete with Pikachu murals and games consoles that sold no beer or wine but did offer mysterious bottles of Chinese alcohol labelled as 60 per cent proof (we didn’t try it). And then on Monday morning, fuelled on orange juice and a free bread roll (“ideal breakfast fully included”) we headed once again for Argentina.
Dave and I have crossed a fair few borders by now on this trip, and we know to have the answers to certain questions ready, like “where are you staying?”, “how long for?” and “do you know this man?”. The immigration officer we meet at 8am or 5pm or 2.45am could be the friendliest polyglot (it happened once, crossing into Brazil) or a miserable jobsworth, suspicious of everything about us – it’s pure luck. Which is why it was a surprise to be waved through after 30 seconds at the kiosk serving as border control, the immigration officer asking us only one word: “hostel?” to which Dave replied, “Si,” and that was that.
There’s always something a bit surreal about crossing a border by foot. We left the kiosk window, walked over a small bridge, and just like that, we were back in Argentina. The border town could have been identical to its Bolivian twin, but for the fact the roads were immediately smoother and tarmacked and cleaner, and the usual statues of blokes were shiny and gold, a glimmer of the time not so long ago when Argentina was wealthy.
Sometimes Google Maps seems like a great ally, like the time 24 hours earlier when we were looking at the Western Unions in La Quiaca and it gave us the heads up that they were all closed on a Sunday (thanks Google, that was a close one, better spend a night here in this bleak border town). And then sometimes Google Maps is pure garbage, especially in small Latin American towns (and the whole of Peru, oddly) and it turns out the thing you’re trying to find closed down years ago and the point marked on the map as a post office is now someone’s burnt-out allotment.
None of the three Western Unions marked on Google for La Quiaca – the same ones it told us were closed on Sundays – existed in real life, even on a Monday. Dave ran around town trying to find an alternative while I parked myself with the bags in the bus terminal, but finally we had to admit defeat. By this point he’d been gone so long that the other beggars in the terminal who’d been asking me for cash had started offering me bites of their sandwich instead. We didn’t have a penny to our name in any currency, and from where we saw it, our options seemed to be bargain our way onto a bus somehow with the promise of cash later on, or join my new friends by sleeping in the bus terminal.
I heard an announcement for a bus leaving towards Salta and decided to run over to ask about getting on it. And what did I see on the bus company’s ticket counter, next to a poster stating Las Malvinas son Argentina*, but a freshly laminated sign for Mastercard.
A few months ago, the idea that one could simply buy a bus ticket with their credit card in Argentina was absurd. But it turns out some things have changed since we last visited in February. It’s possible we wasted our afternoon, and maybe our entire day and the previous night in Villazón, but the good news was that the bus was leaving imminently and we could pay in plastic to get it on it.
We spent a really solidly lovely week making our way down the Quebrada route. Humahuaca is a very pretty and tranquil town with old stone houses and a cute plaza with donkeys roaming around it, not to mention an eccentric clock tower featuring a mechanical waving saint. We ate dinner by candlelight with a front-row seat at a peña (traditional music show), where women played the flute and sang wholesome songs about Pachamama (mother Earth).
One of the main tourist attractions around Humahuaca is a visit to see El Hornocal, knows as the “14 colours mountain”. It’s a striking range of mountain peaks with colourful stripes as a result of the different minerals in the rocks – a little like Peru’s Rainbow Mountain, and I suspect with the same number of colours, truth be told. But I guess on a continent spilling over with mountain views, you’ve got to find your USP.
Dave and I went through the usual performance of speaking to half a dozen tour operators (ie, blokes with cars running up to gringos in the street with leaflets) and eventually settled on the cheapest (ie, a guy whose car bumper was quite literally held together with duct tape). And it was fun couple of hours with a solid six out of ten view. But I’d had an itch for a decent hike to see the landscape away from the tour vans, and the following morning we decided to set out from town on our own, following a route marked out on Alltrails.
It was hands down the best walk we’d done in a while, and refreshing to be able to simply stride out of town without having to pay any cab drivers or lurking local trolls an unofficial fee. Beautiful weather, show-off views in every direction, and not a single other soul apart from a rabbit or two. About halfway along the trail, we reached a higher ridge and realised we had a crystal clear view of the 14 colours mountain – all to ourselves, without having to pay a penny for it. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere, if I can be bothered to find it.
(* “The Falklands are Argentine”. This slogan is everywhere in Argentina, people have it written on the bumpers of their car and you’ll see it plastered on huge motorway billboards. It's completely fascinating to me, especially in a place like La Quiaca, which is 3,350km away from the islands. But then I recently learned that Argentinian children sing a patriotic song about Las Malvinas in school every day. The Argentinian friend who told me this said they suspected a lot of people have no idea where the islands are, or even what the song signifies. To be fair, I suspect plenty of Brits would also need it pointing out to them on a map. Topical!)
Travel bits and tips from this week
In Bolivia, we took a bus from Tarija to Tupiza and stayed at the Hostal Butch Cassidy. We ate a confusing but ultimately satisfying dinner at Restaurant Green Planet.
From Tupiza we took a colectivo to the border town of Villazón, and spent an unplanned night at the Hotel Ideal, which was orange and strange but absolutely ideal for our needs.
Villazón is fairly devoid of sights or atmospheric places to eat, but we had a fun meal at Kimchi Gamer and a pleasant couple of hours sitting at a place marked as the Oh La La café on Google (in real life it has a different but similarly faux-French name; just off the main square, the only place open on a Sunday).
The following morning we walked across the border and into La Quiaca, where we eventually got on a bus heading straight down towards Salta. Which was a relief, because it’s possible La Quiaca has even less going on that Villazón.
Humahuaca was a joy. We stayed at the Buena Vista hostel which was super chilled and welcoming, and we ate and drank at Aisito (where we enjoyed the peña), Pachamanka (excellent sharing platters including llama stew), La Puerta Verde, Las Glorias (a decent lunch deal), Julieta Limon Y Sol (reasonable pasta) and La Casona de Humahuaca (the best lemonade).
This is the route we hiked (it’s called Peña Blanca on Alltrails). Unchallenging, only 90 minutes long but with incredibly scenery – views of El Hornocal, plus 10-metre high cacti!
I’m writing this from Asunción in Paraguay (spoiler – we made it!) where we are spending my birthday at the rather lovely Villa Floreal hotel.
And finally a sneaky little note to say that my newsletter was selected as a featured post by the Smallstack group on Substack (the platform through which I publish this newsletter) the other week. If you’ve made it this far, take a look!
