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Jan. 22, 2007 Saturday, January 20, I arrived in San Salvador de Jujuy , Argentina from Tucumán. It’s a six-hour ride over heavily afforested hills and dales, with outliers of the Andes ever visible in the distance to the west. The fare was $12. Now I’m practically at the Tropic of Capricorn, within around 50 miles of Chile on the west and 50 of Bolivia on the north. San Salvador de Jujuy, which is the capital of the province of Jujuy , is itself usually called just Jujuy (pronounced approximately Hoo-hooey). I’ve known a folksong called “¡Viva Jujuy !” since the sixties, and I’ve known the names of all the Argentine provinces for 10 years or so, but this was not in preparation for my present trip. It just worked out that way. The Amerindian population of Argentina amounts to fewer than 1% of the country’s 39 million, so efficacious was the Spanish conquest and genocide. In Buenos Aires , you hardly see any of those big brown circular faces so typical of Indian women. Nor did I see many traces of Indians in the other 13 provinces I visited. Now suddenly, I’m in the midst of Quechua and Aymara
country. The Quechuas of course are the lineal descendants of what we call the Incas. “Inca” means “emperor” and referred properly to the man who sat in the throne in Perú rather than the whole nation, who have always been the Quechua or, more correctly, Quichua. One will notice that Hispanic people, though they sometimes operate stalls and stands, are generally disinclined to sit on the ground. So the minute I got off the bus and saw dozens of brown women sitting all over the sidewalks, selling vegetables, handicrafted wares, candy and other odds and ends, I knew I where I was. Being half Indian myself, I always feel a sort of remote curiosity. The city of Jujuy has about 250,000, with a metropolitan population of 400,000. Though the neighborhood around the terminal is something of a rude marketplace, there are some very beautiful, elegant neighborhoods in town, with stylish medical offices, stores, government buildings and churches. The
temperature right now is about 86º F (30º C), and it’s a brilliant sunny day so far, with a likelihood of some cloudiness in the afternoon. I’ve enrolled for a guided excursion through the Yungas, the local jungle, Wednesday. This cost about $30. But there’s no excursion to the famous Quebrada (ravine, canyon) of Humahuaca till next week, so I’ll probably miss that. I still want to visit the provinces of Catamarca, La
Rioja and San Juan before I go back to Buenos Aires . I took a room in the first hotel that had a vacancy, and it costs US $16 a day. Later, I found that there is a superabundance of $10 hotels on the streets of the city, and one of them would have suited me just fine. Oh well! Here’s a typical street scene in San Salvador de Jujuy.
------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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