Cerro Colorado - a bit of a low point

We were the last people on the bus when it chugged to a stop, parking up beside the dusty track. Cerro Colorado turned out to be a tiny town with no more than a few houses dotted around. Its famed for its pre-Colombian cave drawings, the oldest in Argentina, yet no signs of the town developing into a tourist hotspot. Urbanites that we are, we felt like we were in the middle of nowhere. Forget mobile signals, or the internet. Here, most people didn’t even have a landline that worked. Three wide-eyed teenagers looked on mutely, sipping on their Fantas through straws as we struggled with our backpacks. Where the hell were we? The panic in our eyes must’ve been obvious, because the bus driver took one look at us and kindly offered to drive us down the deserted dusty road to where we were staying, in his thick Cordoba accent which I barely understood.
‘La Italiana’ was owned by a rather lonely old man, with thick eyebrows and again, to our foreign ears, a completely unintelligible accent. We dumped our stuff, and went in search of the ‘boliche’ the owner mentioned was down the pitch black, unlit road. It turned out to be a small shack selling everything from dusty crisp packets to homemade empanadas. We ordered a dusty crisp packet, a couple of empanadas and a big bottle of Quilmes to help us get through the night. Back at the cabana, the owner said he was barbecuing a goat and did we want some? Being British, we said yes, even though we meant no – purely to avoid hurting his feelings. He brought in a huge plate of shredded meat - chewy, fatty, and rather disgusting. Fifteen minutes later, he brought in another huge platter – a second helping. We nodded in appreciation and said thank you, terrified of hurting his feelings, even though most of the first platter had ended up in the bin.
The next morning the weather turned unbearably cold. Our teeth chattered as we huddled together, listening to the guide talk through the cave drawings. Although most of them, it seemed, were unexplicable. “And his squiggle,” he said too often, “has not been deciphered yet – we don’t know what it means”. Time to go, but no one could agree on what time the bus left. We rocked up at the bus stop, which turned out to be a cement hut with no windows or doors in the middle of the motorway. Here, we waited for 2 hours in the company of a toothless old man who spent the time tapping his feet rhythmically to stave off the freezing cold. We were glad to leave Cerro Colorado.