You can see the hash coming from the volcano

The last week has been a hectic blur of bus journeys, screaming kids, glimmering salt lakes and pink flamingoes, towering rocks and cavernous hollows. I began in San Pedro de Atacama, and believing that I only had a week before my train left Calama (Chile) to Uyuni (Bolivia), I rushed around Salta, only to return today to the news that the last train left in 2007. I´m not having much luck with my travel arrangements.

The week started in San Pedro de Atacam, a natural oasis town of green trees sitting in a huge bowl between towering mountains to the west and the high, antiplano to the east, a small spot of green in one of the driest regions on earth. The town has a feeling of it with narrow, atmospheric streets with low adobe houses and walls topped off with sticks. They were so low that in the fading light of my first night, I felt that I could look over like a giant to the dry, shimmering plain beyond. Like Chalten, though, San Pedro has become a huge tourist destination and its native charm is somewhat eclipsed by the tour agencies on every corner and the artesania shops that occupy some of the oldest houses.

My stay here began badly as I got stuck in a small hole of a hostel, lorded over by a huge fat chilean with dumpling eyes swimming in fat. There was a guy staying in my room with thick, black curly hair and an impish smile who claimed that he had slept with a girl from every South American country except Bolivia and Paraguay, but vowed to battle on to complete the circuit. Anyway, when checking out, he was told that he couldn´t leave his mochila in the hostel and he couldn´t speak to his German friend in the hostel. This sent him into a spasm of rage, his German friend lost his typical Aryan restraint and called the owner a fat bastard and the greasy haired proprietor raised himself from his chair for the first time that day to tower over the Israeli, his paunch a good metre from his spinal cord.

Thankfully, the excursions went better. The second day I was there, I dragged myself out of bed to see the shooting geysers at 4AM, my head aching and banging against a rattling window. Some of the fumaroles gave off just steam, other geysers spat boiling water like oil from a pan, and others had been covered with beautiful, intricate patterns of mineral deposits, shining silver, green and ochre in the slanting rays of the early morning. When we arrived, the temperature was a chilly 12 below, a good incentive to get as close to the geysers as possible. At four that afternoon, I hit sandsurfing with two Japanese girls from my hostel who carried an electronic dictionary and estimated my age at twenty-five, much to my chagrin. Our guide was a slim chilian, a skater by profession who had been forced to guide because he had damaged his foot. His eyes were very blood-shot and he hid them behind big, red, plastic glasses. The sandunes were located in an incredible valley, Valle de la Muerte, a barren inlet surrounded by triangular mountains, piled one behind the other like sharks´teeth. I showed little aptitude for the sandsurfing, could not go five metres without falling over and got thoroughly impregnated with sand, but loved it nevertheless, even more so because we were left to it rather than being given lengthy explanations like other groups. Hurrying as the sun began to set, we toured the Valle de la Luna, visiting chiselled mountains of rock contracting with creaks as the sun descended, others that bristled with thousands of tiny creases running down the rock from sharp points and still another that looked like a surging waves of steps in the dying light. We were also hurried to the Tres Marias (three pillars of rock eroded into lunar shapes) the Amphiteatro (a mass of rock that looked like an accordion) and a huge sand dune, but the real highlight was seeing the sun set from a ridge, surrounded by active and extinct volcanos, the dying day slowly splitting the uniform blue of the sky into dark purple, blood red, orange, yellow, green and infinite shades of blue. After smoking a joint, the guide tried to explain to us the formation of the volcanos; "You see the hash from the volcano". Ten goes later and he was still staying "hash". "Hobbies" might have provoked similar problems".

I then travelled across a salt lake spotted with pink flamingoes and had my bag searched by masked officials before reaching Salta, a city that I would recommend to anyone thinking of coming to Argentina. It is the most visually beautiful city that I have visited, is cheaper than the rest of the country, is a lively university city and is surrounded on all sides by incredible scenery. Cachi and Cafayate are separated to the south by a dramatic gorge, while to the north, the multi-coloured, rippling Quebrada de Humahuaca winds its way through Purmamarca and Tilcara to the remote Iruya. I visited Pumamarca and Iruya, the former a tiny, dusty village surrounded by vivid, multi-coloured rock and mountains that descend from a ridge before fracturing again and again into hundred of ever thinner pieces of rock, exactly like the wide root system of a tree.The colour of the rock nearest to the town is a deep red, like Ibizan earth. Different strata of soft rock run through it, coloured chalk, a dark sickly green and a deep purple. In some places, it looks as if funeral monuments have been carved into the rock, while in others, bulging, bulbous bubbles of rock have solidified to form smooth, modernist sculptures that seem to twist and writhe.

The road north to the cheap Iruya (you can get a dormitory bed in Iruya for 10 pesos, less than two pounds) zigzags crazily across the mountain, forcing the bus driver to perform switchbacks that leave the front bumper hanging over the edge. But it is worth it. The landscape here defies all superlatives. From a viewing point, we could see a huge mountain sweeping down from above us, before suddenly crumbling into a gorge. The cut was not exact, however, because huge spurs penetrated into the valley, themselves eroded into thin, tapering spikes descending from a common centre. Fertile fields above are separated by a drop of some hundreds of feet from a dry river bed where a few donkeys plodded langorously along. It was a landscape fit for the dinosaur.

Everyone is smoking weed here, except me of course, and a bubbling Frenchman in Salta said he would bring us some Coke if we wanted. He has also been using prostitutes all over South America because they are so chep and because he doesn´t believe it is possible to meet a good women out on the open road. The Belgians who I shared a room with in Iruya were also into their grass, including other things, notably tennis. They declared that Tipsarevic was a presumptuous yuppy from new Belgrade, rejected my suggestion that Djokovic was arrogant and criticised Federer and Nadal as boring machines.

People in Northern Argentina are racially different from their counterparts in Buenos Aires or Patagonia, far similar in appearance to Bolivians, (the same may be the case for the people in the far north of Chile that was wrested from Peru during the War of the Pacific). In general, they are shorter and thicker set, their skin and hair is darker and their cheekbones are higher, accentuating their large noses and full lips. Their faces seem to be rounder. Furthermore, despite all the tourism in Salta, people in some of the outlying regions are poor. Jujuy bus station was dirty and slightly menacing, peopled by hawkers selling fruit jelly and barefoot children with mud-smeared faces and rags of clothes, throwing themselves on the pity of passers-by. People also seem to be ruder that in other areas of Argentina. Few people know how the queue, when I got up on a bus to give my seat to a pregnant woman, she did not thank me, and one of the bus porters was a monster. His voice was so high that he couldn´t speak properly, just like the German man in the famous Boomeran YouTube clip, but he made up for his defect by being an insolent bastard. When I approached him, he demanded money for dragging my bag two metres and when I told him that I didn´t have any, he threw it back into the hold.

Yet in the tiny village of San Isidro, some old people live as their anscestors must have hudreds of years ago. They grow their own crops, wash their clothes in the river and rear cattle for the slaughter. As I approached San Isidro during a hike, I small a tiny, wrinkled stick of a woman bent over and hacking away at a dry plant with an axe. When I returned down the path some twenty minutes later, she had hauled the bundle of sticks onto her fragile back and was walking across some stepping stones, struggling to protect her feet from the surging water.