Painted Hands
A hand reaches out for a hollow guanaco bone, breathes the paste into the tube and blows through it hard like a whistle to create the negative outline of a hand on the rock face. This process was done over thousands of years throughout the entire Holocene, which spans around 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age.
Or at least that is how they have suggested they were created because noone knows for sure. Techniques changed over the centuries and millennia to create the Cueva De Las Manos Pintadas, the cave of the painted hands, which despite the name is actually a series of cave paintings along a 500m stretch of cliff face hanging over a canyon in the Southern Patagonia steppe.
The common tourist cannot access the cave as it is surrounded by a protective fence but it is not necessary to enter to admire the prehistoric cave paintings as most are on the outside of the cliff.
To get here, I booked a tour by whatsapp on the Chilean border the night earlier and was picked up from my hostel in the morning. It's 173km to the UNESCO world heritage site from Los Antiguos, and the journey takes about two and half hours. The first part of the route is on the paved Ruta 40, a road which I said goodbye to in Humahuaca, on the border of Bolivia over one month ago and will shortly be using much more often as I make my way to the end of the world. The second part of the journey is by ripio, or off road on a bumpy dusty road.
Off the bus, we hike an hour and a half quickly through the canyon, taking care not to slip on the sandy surface. The entire area is coated in what appears to be sand, but is actually volcanic ash from Mount Hudson, to our west in the Andes. All the estancias (farmholds) in the area went out of business when up to one and half metres of ash coated the area, destroying the natural vegetation and causing the sheep to starve.
The main income is now, we are told, gold and silver mining, in the town of Perito Moreno. It has six hotels which are open all year around but they are mostly dedicated to the miners and not tourists like us. Tourism, we are told, is still in its infancy here. But, in my opinion it is much more organised than over the border.
We finally reach the paintings and admire the ochre, black, red and, rare green figures and drawings on the wall. They are all protected behind a sturdy white fence.
I am on a guided tour and after the tour, we are given free time to wander up the wooden walkway and study the paintings at our leisure. On my own, on the way back, I see a small set of wooden steps that lead to another section of the wall and eagerly climb them.
I reach the top to see several little hands painted on the bare wall. Then, I glance around and look at a massive rock overhang over me. Below it are broken rocks with deteriorated handprints over them.
I see everyone else on the tour walk past, oblivious to this section. I think we ought to have been brought here first to make us really appreciate what has been done here to conserve this.
Or at least that is how they have suggested they were created because noone knows for sure. Techniques changed over the centuries and millennia to create the Cueva De Las Manos Pintadas, the cave of the painted hands, which despite the name is actually a series of cave paintings along a 500m stretch of cliff face hanging over a canyon in the Southern Patagonia steppe.
The common tourist cannot access the cave as it is surrounded by a protective fence but it is not necessary to enter to admire the prehistoric cave paintings as most are on the outside of the cliff.
To get here, I booked a tour by whatsapp on the Chilean border the night earlier and was picked up from my hostel in the morning. It's 173km to the UNESCO world heritage site from Los Antiguos, and the journey takes about two and half hours. The first part of the route is on the paved Ruta 40, a road which I said goodbye to in Humahuaca, on the border of Bolivia over one month ago and will shortly be using much more often as I make my way to the end of the world. The second part of the journey is by ripio, or off road on a bumpy dusty road.
Off the bus, we hike an hour and a half quickly through the canyon, taking care not to slip on the sandy surface. The entire area is coated in what appears to be sand, but is actually volcanic ash from Mount Hudson, to our west in the Andes. All the estancias (farmholds) in the area went out of business when up to one and half metres of ash coated the area, destroying the natural vegetation and causing the sheep to starve.
We finally reach the paintings and admire the ochre, black, red and, rare green figures and drawings on the wall. They are all protected behind a sturdy white fence.
I am on a guided tour and after the tour, we are given free time to wander up the wooden walkway and study the paintings at our leisure. On my own, on the way back, I see a small set of wooden steps that lead to another section of the wall and eagerly climb them.
I reach the top to see several little hands painted on the bare wall. Then, I glance around and look at a massive rock overhang over me. Below it are broken rocks with deteriorated handprints over them.
I see everyone else on the tour walk past, oblivious to this section. I think we ought to have been brought here first to make us really appreciate what has been done here to conserve this.
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