Leaving Tilcara to head for Salta we drove south a few kilometers and stopped at a place called Posta de Hornillos, an old low level building that was once a staging post on the trade route between Buenos Aires and Lima. The building has been turned into a museum and it´s a quiet and peaceful place. Wandering through the simple whitewashed rooms decorated with colourful rugs, antique furniture, religious iconography and descriptions of how life was lived in those tough times, when all travel was done by horse, and food and other commodities had to travel for days to reach their destination was evocative and interesting. More so as we were the only people there at the time, surprisingly it doesn´t seem to get much tourist traffic.

After our stop at the museum we headed to Purmamarca, another dusty little town in the Quebrada de Humahuaca, this one nestling under a huge multi-coloured hill called, appropriately, Cerro de los Siete Colores. Purmamarca is a cute little village, filled with adobe houses centred around the omnipresent village square, only in this instance it´s more pepper shaped than square. It´s also rimmed with market stalls (our lucky day!) selling the obligatory ponchos, knitted socks, stripey backpacks and things made out of cactus wood, which turns out to be light and spongey, a bit like balsa wood.

We have, so far, been able to resist the purchase of large and/or stripey things. Brian keeps reminding me that we have probably already far exceeded the luggage limit on our flight home, but on spotting a particularly fine looking specimen of stripey handicraft I manage to persuade him that there are other options, and, surprisingly, he admits that the rug I am currently admiring would look mighty fine hung on the wall, and with that a deal is done. The strange thing is the new stuff here is quite cheap, it´s the old, dusty, worn look that carries a premium. The sellers like to call them ´antique´, but I´m horrified to find that this means they are only about 20 - 30 years old. Therefore they were manufactured at the height of the glorious disco era. Harrumph, hardly my definition of antique I thinks.

Myriam, my lovely Argentinean friend who is currently residing in Leeds (yes, why? you may well ask) informs me that despite my earlier blog, I am actually in North West Argentina, not the North East, at which point Brian mutters something about my navigation skills never having been as good as I have maintained, a comment which I choose to ignore. She also points out that Simon and Garfunkel stole their songs from some passing Andean pipe player, which I find hard to believe, but as she does officially know EVERYTHING, I have to assume she is right.