Nowhere

“You can’t help but notice,” I couldn’t help but remark, “standing here, amidst all this majestic beauty, that, well, you’re in the middle of nowhere.”

Lief grew up with these landscapes, but Matt and I, hailing from sea level, have been gob-stopped.

Nevertheless, impressive as the views are, as I pointed out that day, standing in the middle of a broad plain, the stark mountains rising all around in the distance, you’re no place.

But nowhere has its attractions. No one can find you if you’d prefer to be left alone. Nobody is around to suggest what you might do. You’re on your own to do what you think you want to do, with Mother Nature as your only judge.

We’d traveled far to find ourselves in this remote region of northern Argentina. To remind us just how expansive this country is, the next morning’s drive to the airport took nearly five hours. We’d made the trek in after dark, so this early-morning run to Tucuman was our first chance to witness by daylight what must be one of the world’s most dramatic drives, along switch-backing cliffside roads no wider than a single vehicle in many places and dropping off along the outside edge into valleys that, in the morning mist, seemed bottomless. In one place, the thick, dense white morning clouds swirled amidst the mountaintops like a sea of foam or, as Jack observed from the back seat as we approached, “heaven.”

Through the clouds, down the circuitous and rocky mountain roads, we arrived, finally, in the foothills, where the road straightened out and became a paved highway. The road improved, no question, but our impression of a whole lotta’ nowhere persisted.

“You wouldn’t want to make a wrong turn in these parts,” I suggested to Lief, driving. “You could travel days before you came to another option.”

“Well, you might run out of gas first,” Maria offered from her back-seat post with Jackson.

In fact, we’d yet to pass a gas station, a rest stop, or any other sign of civilization. You want to know where you’re going and to set out well-provisioned when you take off for a drive in this part of the world.

Our accommodation for part of our escape to nowhere had been a wine boutique hotel, recently opened, called La Casa de la Bodega. This is the kind of place you might find in Nappa Valley, a charming little hotel attached to a small vineyard and winery, each guest room called by one of the appellations of grapes grown here and offering a view out over the house vines and, beyond them, of those ever-present mountain faces. We took a tour of the wine-making operation our first evening, then tasted one of the bodega’s whites and one of its reds in an underground room with stone walls.

After the tasting, upstairs in the sitting room, warming flickers in the enormous open fireplace, we enjoyed more of the house vino while, outside, through the plains and across the acres of vines, the wind howled.

People have been making wine in this region of Argentina for hundreds of years. Around Cafayate you find four or five major labels, including Laborum, which, after our week of tasting, we voted our favorite. Matt bought 10 bottles to carry home with him.

Wine…and cheese. In this part of the world, often too rocky, hilly, and rugged for cows, it’s goat cheese. You see herds of them in the fields, on the hills, roaming seemingly free and often halting your journey. We waited four or five minutes for a crowd of them to cross the road in front of us one night. “Just like in Ireland,” Lief remarked, “only there we’d be waiting on sheep.”

The Jesuits established the first dairy farms here. Their cheese-making recipes, brought from Spain, are still followed today.

You might imagine that you’d get bored with nowhere after a while, but our week’s stay only whetted my appetite. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought as we made the drive through the hills for the final time on our way back to the airport for the return flight to Buenos Aires, to be able to return…to have a reason to seek out regular doses of nowhere.

Two reasons caught our attention, a big tract of land between Cafayate and Salta that Lief spent an afternoon touring…and a little corner colonial in Cafayate town, a block off the main square that might make a good renovation project.

There’s no real estate industry in this town right now. We found one contact, who works not from an office but from his house and who, as far as I could tell, doesn’t have a telephone. You leave messages for him with a neighbor. When Matt, Mary, and I showed up for our appointment with him at 1.30 p.m. one afternoon, he finally emerged from his house, after some coaxing, rubbing the siesta sleep from his eyes and staring blankly at us, daring us to justify our presence. He spoke not a word of English, and, without Lief, off in Salta for the afternoon, our group’s collective level of Spanish was basic at best. The conversation started painfully, but our new Cafayatean friend warmed up as he drove us around town. After 10 minutes, he was smiling and pleasantly accommodating our language limitations.

I had spied the corner casa I mentioned to you on a walk with Lief the day before. No, it’s not for sale, our new friend explained when I led him to it, but I can check with the family, who lives outside town in a small pueblo, he offered. Maybe they’d be interested in selling.

Do you know of any other houses that are for sale right now, I managed en Español.

No, nothing is for sale, our real estate contact explained. But you point out anything you like, and I can find out if the owner might be interested in an offer…

Back in B.A. now, I await word from Cafayate that the owners of the little casa rojo might entertain an offer from the crazy gringo señora…and Lief continues to deliberate on the big, hilly parcel he viewed. Maybe we’ll make a quick return visit to Cafayate for another look before we leave the country…another quick shot of nowhere to carry us through.

Kathleen Peddicord
Publisher, International Living