Hola! John here.
I´m writing from Jujuy (pronounced who-hooey) in Northern Argentina. We are having a do nothing-day and it´s been very successful so far. This was partly planned, partly just necessary. It´s both Sunday and the day of the national election so practically everything is closed. The place was like a ghost town for much of the day, except for the cops on every street corner. We were told yesterday that the people of Jujuy province were so fed up with the local governor (his job is also up for grabs today) that they tried to set fire to the legislature. It´s all blocked off and also surrounded by cops. It sounds as if Christina, the wife of the current president is way out in front in that race, no word on the provincial election.
So, today we slept in, we bought somre bread and salami at a grocery that was open and walked down to a park for a picnic. We discovered a public swimming pool that was open and made use of it. We´d brought our bathing suits thinking we may go to some hot springs outside town, but a cool pool was much better since it was yet again blazing hot with a cloudless sky.
We´ve done some reading and napping and that´s about it. We did pick up our bus tickets to the border. We´ll stay in the Argentine town of La quiaca on Tuesday, then on WEdnesday we´ll cross the border and take a train to the town of Tupiza, where we´ll likely begin an excursion into the salt flats called Salar De Uyuni.
We arrived here by a semi-circuitous route from Salta, a larger city.
Salta was pretty, with a lovely and busy central square.
We visited the museum of high altitude archaeology there, which has a controversial exhibit of the perfectly preserved body of an Inca girl who was sacrificed on a mountain top 500 years ago--scroll bak a few entries for a photo. There were very interesting (at least by Rhia´s translation) displays on the Inca practise of making offeriongs of high-born and beautiful children to earn the favour of gods. And they went into their beliefs abot what happened to the children and the significance of all the items that were placed with them. At then end, you could choose to look at the body or not to. I think many Inca descended people feel it´s inappropriate to display her this way. However, we looked at the exhibit and it really was very fascinating. The cold, dry conditions kept the body entirely intact. She really could have been and young teen who´d nodded off on her knees. The texture of her skin was completely natural and you could see the tiny braids in her hair ad so on. While I had a sense that this wasn´t something anyone had intended I would be regarding 500 years later, it was a worhtwhile experience. I did wonder how the guard who has to stand with this body all day felt about it.
So yesterday we took an organized trip from Salta through the canyon of Humahuaca. Having grown up on the prairies, I´m easily impressed by any kind of mountain at all, but these were really dazzling. They were large mountains, though not yet the Andes proper, but the remarkable thing was the colour of them. They had names like the painter´s palette and the hill of seven colours and had patterns of red and green and orange for geological reasons Rhia understood better than I, being the duaghter of a geologist man.
We also stopped at several little towns along the way. We´re clearly moving toward a more aboriginal culture. Homes and villages are built in age old style of local materials and takiong into account heat and wind and earthquakes. We definitely stand out even more as white people.
We had a good time, on the trip, though we grew tired of our guide who talked a blue streak (thankfully, I think, in English) with little opportunity for questions and occassional tirades about lazy poor people. We reversed course at Humahuaca and came back here to Jujuy. Another great thing about Jujuy: it´s crossed by the Ria Xibi Xibi (heebee heebee)--though the river turned out to be maybe two metres wide. I´ve been having fun saying who-hooey, heebeeheebee.

So, random notes from almost a month of travel: We really miss the rights afforded to pedestrians in Halifax. Here, lots of intersections are just uncontrolled, so you´re just running whenever you can. Most that are controlled only have traffic lights and often they´re hard to see from the street corner, but you try to go on green and again, you usually run. Even when there are pedestrian signals, they don´t give you the right of way or anything crazy like that. If a car is turning or something, the car goes. i suppose it just means you´re somewhat less likely to get killed. We´ve each had moments when we judged it safe to cross and dashed only to find the other still at the corner and cringing.
We hear the Rihanna song Um-ber-ella everywhere all the time. I don´t now any words except Um-ber-ella, which, since eating that sandwich as big as my head in Sao Paulo, I always replace with mortadella. The next most popular artist in South America is clearly Bob Marley, and there´s always some kind of reggae playing.
All the mandated safety measures that seem to affect everything we do in North America, no one has any time for here. And yet there arençt catastrophic things happening every minute. You take a taxi with no headlights and no seatbelts up a very windy, cobbled street late at night and you survive. Trucks with loads of kids in the open cab do not send them flying all over ecration. People are welding in very crowded markets with no protecttion and nobody loses any eyes. The concrete slippery with beer steps at the futbol stadium are entirely corwded top to bottom with people the whole game and there are no stampedes or tramplings...those sorts of things.
The whole population seems very young. There are mind boggling numbers of pregnant women out and about and loads of teens and young kids and tots every where. And people go out with their kids a lot. If they´re shopping, or having dinner at 11 p.m. or whatever, they just bring the kids along. And we wnjoy how affectionate they all seem to be with their kids. Actually, they´re just kind of affectionate. Park benches everywhere are kind of evenly split between homeless old guys and teens making out.
I´m beginning to master the kissing on the cheek greeting/parting thing, though I´m probably prety scratchy now, being into week two of project grow a beard. It still has a lot of filling in to do, but it´s clearly at a going to be a beard stage rather than a forgot to shave again stage.

Rhia´s busily uploading some photos of Sao Paulo and so on, I don´t know if any beard shots will get in there.
Salud!