The Long Haul

Here in the Andes, every time we take our food or something to drink, we share with Mother Earth the first.

Mm-hmm.

So thank you, Mother Earth.

Thank you, Mother Earth.

And thank you the family to visit us.

Oh, thank you.

You've been amazing.

Gracias.

Here in Jujuy in Northern Argentina, the first drop of wine is not for us.

Instead, it is poured onto the earth beneath the table.

A little bit of wine for Pachamama, or Mother Earth, given before anyone else takes a drink.

It's a belief based on reciprocity.

You receive from the earth, but you must also give back.

At dinner the previous evening, our host Fabio had explained that Pachamama was central to the cultures that lived in these valleys before the Inca times.

The Inca world became socially associated with Inti, the sun god, but among the older cultures here, it was Mother Earth that was the principal spiritual force.

It was, Fabio told us, a culture of giving and receiving in food, in clothes, in ceremonies, something that happened all along the ancient trade routes, which thanks to the humble camelids such as the llama, connected the remote Andean communities here with Bolivia and Chile for thousands of years.

On a mission to trace these old routes, my journey begins in the back of a Ford Ranger, trundling along a dusty road in Jujuy, close to Argentina's northern border with Bolivia.

Dark clouds are gathering over the Andes.

Rain here is rare, but when it arrives, it comes suddenly.

We jump out of the truck and follow fast along a narrow path around enormous cardon cacti and thorny chirihue trees.

The landscape here is arid and abrasive.

Fabio leads us down to a dry riverbed.

He finds a long stick and points at a sloping rock beneath a small pool of water

[foreign language]

Um, so basically the drawings are very dispersed throughout the whole, um, mural, the whole rock, and there's some parts that are not here anymore because the structure that we are on kind of like doesn't let the, all the river come through, and it destroyed a bit of what is the mural