The first thing I did in the morning was visit the Museo Arqueológica de Alta Montaña - the museum of high altitude archeology. They display Inca mummies discovered in 1999 at the top of a nearby volcano, in an altitude of 6700 meters.
I never knew much about the Inca, but as it turns out, they used to sacrifice children. The mummies on display are children aged 6, 7 and 15 years.
Sacrifice children? Why, oh why would they do that? I know I am judging another culture according to my modern European values, but I think sacrificing children is just evil. If adults choose to sacrifice themselves for some purpose that's another story, but children should really be untouchable.
That being said, it is amazing how well-preserved both the mummies and the items buried next to them are. Apparently, they believed that death is just a transition, and that the miniature items given to the children would help them after. So there is a whole array of miniature festive inca clothing, animals, utensils and jewelry. Judging from these items, they were quite advanced craftspeople.
As a contrast after the museum, I took a bus to a small town called La Caldera, some 45 minutes away. There I attended my first real South American carnival festivity: the unearthing of carnival.
The procedure was accompanied by a group of costumed people dancing and beating drums:
And this, I guess, is the place carnival was dug out from:
People were putting in offerings of some sort - mostly drinks, but also cigarettes.
At the spectator side, huge snow-and-flour battles were taking place where nobody was being spared. These two were taking a short break from the mayhem:
There were big stacks of artificial snow spray on sale, and apparently the cans went quickly ;-)
After going back to Salta, I climbed Cerro San Bernardo which offers a great view of Salta:
There was quite a crowd of people using the 1000 stairs up the hill as training :-)
In the evening, I treated myself to a big dinner to celebrate my second-to-last day in Argentina. The steak was incredibly big - the picture shows only HALF of it! Just compare the steak to the regular-sized knife...
I was pretty much full after half of it, but of course I couldn't let the yummy steak go to waste ;-)
I never knew much about the Inca, but as it turns out, they used to sacrifice children. The mummies on display are children aged 6, 7 and 15 years.
Sacrifice children? Why, oh why would they do that? I know I am judging another culture according to my modern European values, but I think sacrificing children is just evil. If adults choose to sacrifice themselves for some purpose that's another story, but children should really be untouchable.
That being said, it is amazing how well-preserved both the mummies and the items buried next to them are. Apparently, they believed that death is just a transition, and that the miniature items given to the children would help them after. So there is a whole array of miniature festive inca clothing, animals, utensils and jewelry. Judging from these items, they were quite advanced craftspeople.
As a contrast after the museum, I took a bus to a small town called La Caldera, some 45 minutes away. There I attended my first real South American carnival festivity: the unearthing of carnival.
The procedure was accompanied by a group of costumed people dancing and beating drums:
And this, I guess, is the place carnival was dug out from:
People were putting in offerings of some sort - mostly drinks, but also cigarettes.
At the spectator side, huge snow-and-flour battles were taking place where nobody was being spared. These two were taking a short break from the mayhem:
There were big stacks of artificial snow spray on sale, and apparently the cans went quickly ;-)
After going back to Salta, I climbed Cerro San Bernardo which offers a great view of Salta:
There was quite a crowd of people using the 1000 stairs up the hill as training :-)
In the evening, I treated myself to a big dinner to celebrate my second-to-last day in Argentina. The steak was incredibly big - the picture shows only HALF of it! Just compare the steak to the regular-sized knife...
I was pretty much full after half of it, but of course I couldn't let the yummy steak go to waste ;-)
