Folkdancing in Disney World

On my second night in Salta, I met up with a group of people for a social gathering organized through couch surfing.com, which is a network of people around the world who are looking for lodging on the couch or extra bed of a local, and those locals who have lodging to offer. Its also a way to meet people for a drink or a meal or an event, as we were doing that night. The group consisted of three folks from Salta--Alejandro, Valeria, and Leo, as well as Natalie, the British girl who had initiated the gathering, and Andres, a “Porteno,” or Buenos Aires resident, whom she had met on the bus. We met at a pena, which is a restaurant where customers spontaneously get up to play and sing folkloric music. It being a Sunday night, there wasn’t a whole lot of music happening, but it was fun to meet some local young folks, and Alejandro invited Natalie and I to stay at his house the following night.

When I arrived at Alejandro’s house the next evening, I found out that Natalie had just bought a bus ticket to Purmamarca, a tiny town that is the first along the Quebrada de Humahuaca, a popular route leading to the border with Bolivia, with small, traditional mountain towns set amidst dramatic desert landscape (although at this point, I had only just heard of this place, and didn’t know much about it, given my lack of travel guide). I had been wanting to go as well, so the following day (Tuesday), we set off on a four-hour bus ride to Jujuy, the northernmost province in Argentina.

I noticed part way through the bus ride that the bus was nearly full of 22-ish year-old Argentines, most likely from Buenos Aires. There weren’t any, as far as I could tell, foreign travelers, and very few older people. I thought it was interesting, as until now, I had run into young Argentine travelers, but also a good number of foreigners, as well. We arrived in Purmamarca, a town much too small to have its own bus terminal, rather dropping us off on the side of the road, and quickly found Andres, Natalie’s Porteno bus campanion, who had arrived the day before. He led us through narrow, unpaved roads, lined with low adobe buildings, to our hostel, a few blocks away. Even from this point, I could tell that the town consisted of about six blocks by six blocks, and it was then that I first noticed the stunning surroundings; dark red, and multi-colored rocky hills and rock formations rose up on all sides, providing a dramatic, panoramic backdrop for this tiny little village.

We dropped our bags at the hostel and went for a walk along a road surrounding the village. Every turn provided a new, breathtaking scene; the colors of the rocks seemed too vivid to be natural, and we stopped nearly every minute to take another picture.

While the natural beauty of the town was stunning, I was already beginning to feel a little bit unsure about other aspects of the town. Our busload of backpackers was only a portion of the total; the hippie Porteno set was everywhere throughout the town--playing hand drums in the plaza, passing around a cut-off soda bottle full of wine, sharing joints on the tops of various surrounding look-outs. I soon realized that they vastly outnumbered the “locals.”

“Local” was a relative term as well. In addition to the older, single-story adobe buildings built closer to the plaza, newer, more stylized versions made up the fringe of town, housing restaurants adorned with Andean “artesania,” and hotels with enclosed parking lots. Joaquin, the driver we hired to take us to the nearby salt flats, had grown up in Purmamarca. When Andres remarked how much the town had changed since he had been here ten years ago, Joaquin replied that the tourist boom had started around 2003. “What did people do for a living before that?“ I asked. “They used to farm the land, but by then, they couldn’t make a living anymore. They moved to the city, or to Mendoza, to work in the wine vineyards,” he said. Now, the plazas were lined with tables, piled high with “artesania,” some of it, like the thick, natural-dyed tapestries, obviously handmade and seemingly “traditional,” while other items, like the ubiquitous, brightly-colored, cheaper tapestries, bags, and llama-covered sweaters, seemed more likely to have been made in China.

That evening, we ate dinner at a local “pena,” a type of restaurant with live, often spontaneous entertainment, provided by guests or invited musicians who play Argentine folkloric music on guitars, a large, skin-covered drum played with a mallet, and/or a small, ukelele-esque 10-string guitar called a “charrango.” The band that played for us was great. They played a mixture of traditional songs with more contemporary ones, roused a few brave diners to get up and partake in a lesson in how to dance the traditional Argentine folkloric dance, and told us they were part of an artists’ collective from Buenos Aires.



I know my reaction is not unique, but I found myself struggling to free myself from it while I was there. Andres and Natalie didn’t seem to find fault with what I felt was a false and fetishized façade. Am I really so cynical? I asked myself more than once. After all, this town had seemingly been saved by tourism. I often thought about a similar high-altitude village in northern Chile where I lived for a week while studying abroad. It shared many characteristics with Purmamarca, but most of the thatched roofs of its adobe homes had caved in, long since abandoned by owners who had departed for the city. No more than fifty people lived there when I visited, most of them elderly. Purmamarca would certainly be suffering a similar fate by now, had it not been “discovered” by tourists, its isolation and stunning natural surroundings bolstering the appeal of whatever traditional culture still remained. Now, surely, its population had grown beyond what it had been before the agricultural economy declined. This was surely a good thing, no?

Clearly, also, what attracts us to places like Purmamarca is the opportunity to participate in, if only for a moment, a way of life that we deem to be authentic or traditional, untouched, for the most part, by the pollution of modern culture, which is largely inescapable for us. The week I spent in the village in northern Chile was the richest and most treasured time of my abroad experience. In other words, what we want is an insider’s view into the last remaining hold-outs of “traditional” life. We just don’t want to share it with anyone else.

After Purmamarca we traveled on to a larger town a bit farther north in the Quebrada, called Tilcara. It, too, had a plethora of hostels, tour operators, artesania, and young Portenos. Its bigger size diluted the tourist presence; it seemed to have a more stronger remaining local population and economy. I went along with Andres to the artisan market so he could buy some wall hangings to decorate his apartment. We went on a hike through that beautiful desert landscape to a nearby waterfall. That night, I even joined in at the bar when the hippies started dancing “folklorico.”