Equipo Williams

Two days ago we went to Cueva De Los Manos. Cueva De Los Manos is a cave (well actually it’s more of a wall of rock) with paintings from indigenous peoples in it. 

When we got there at four o clock, the lady said they only had capacity for twenty people each tour, so we got put on the next one, at six. We had to find a way to use up the hour and a half before our tour so we went on a short hike. We walked down the valley to a very slow and windy river. This river I believe flow from the Rio De La Plata in Buenos Aires. The walk was uneventful but steep and by the end, we were all super tired. This made the last stretch of stairs much more difficult, but once I started, I didn’t want to lose momentum, so I charged up the hill even through my “battery” was depleting faster than ten percent a second.

By the time we got to the top we were exhausted and had fifteen minutes before our tour started. We drank some water, used the facilities, and got ready for our tour.

The first thing they made us do was wear helmets, with chinstraps. Now this wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t know they had just been used by a bunch of sweaty gross people coming back from their tour. The fact that they were super uncomfortable didn’t really help either. I was kind of grossed out by the helmets, so I kept moving the chinstrap around and eventually put it underneath my chin so it wasn’t anywhere near my mouth. 

We then started the walk to get to the paintings. It was uneventful for a long time and quite frankly I was fairly bored. At some point I looked at the ground and saw a fairly normal sized spider crawl across the path. This worried me slightly because the rangers had said there were black widows in the area, so i told my parents. They said they were sure it was fine and we kept walking. But, a few seconds later Baba came up to me and confirmed that it was in fact an Argentine black widow, which are highly venomous, but are very shy. 

Shortly after hearing this we got to the first paintings. They were hands colored negatively in all sorts of sizes and colors. The reason they were negative was the technique used to paint them. The painting was done by putting the paint into a tube and then blowing it over the hand. 

Although a vast majority of the paintings were these negative handprints, there were many other characters as well. They showed guanaco, very pregnant guanaco, lizards, pumas, rheas, choiuques (smaller rheas), and Pichus, which are similar to armadillos. There were also footprints of some of the animals, namely the puma, rhea, and choiuque. There were hunting scenes, birth scenes and all sorts of other kinds of paintings which included the animals.

There were also a few geometric shapes and symbols from more recent (three-ish thousand years ago) paintings. These ones were circles, zig-zags, arrows, squiggles, and stuff like that. My favorites were definitely the rhea footprints because they just looked so weird and cool. 

We were reluctant to leave and wanted to know more about the paintings, but our time was up, so our tour group headed back. We stayed at the paintings admiring them as long as we could, but eventually moved on. The whole experience was great and surprisingly similar to cave paintings in the U. S. I would love, not to come back to Cueva De Los Manos per say, but to see other cave paintings similar to this and think, Why are they here? Who painted them? What do each of the scenes really show? What are they supposed to mean?