Cholila - Casa de Piedra - Week 3

Oswaldo the carpenter arrived having recovered from his circular saw injury the month before - nearly took his thumb off. Oswaldo is a great guy and a good carpenter but undoubtebly his greatest skill is making pizzas - wow, a taste sensation.

This week we began collecting rocks to use in the construction of foundations and low-level external walls for the new barn. Normally this might have been a mundane task but we loved it for the following reasons:

1. The sun was shining all week!
2. We used two oxen and a huge old wooden cart to transport the rocks from the hillside down onto the farm.

Now, as you can probably imagine we were petrified of the oxen - they are enormous and have big sharp horns. However, they have also been castrated which means they are much less aggressive and therefore easier to control (which is generally done with a big stick as Lel is demonstrating below (she ran away just after this photo)).

If at this point you are thinking "why didn´t they use the tractor", you are obviously a farming novice. Anyone who´s anyone in Patagonian farming circles knows that ox and cart is better than a tractor because they can traverse more difficult terrain. The second, less important, reason we didn´t use the tractor is that they don´t have one.

Also this week, we went on a horse ride with Christian (the Goucho) in order to herd and count the cattle. It was great fun and we even cantered on the horse, which confusingly in Argentina is called galloping.

On Wednesday we accompanied Sandra to Cholila highschool where she teaches, in order to help with her English language lesson. The kids, all 15 and 16 interviewed us for an imaginary news article. It was actually really good fun, the kids all very nice and the memories came flooding back!

However, the absolute highlight of the week was on Friday morning, when Christian arrived herding all the young cows. Christian does not speak English (he doesn´t speak much of anything) so when he called me into the corral to help, I was not quite expecting what came next. We separated one bull (which was around 14 months old), tied it to a post by it´s neck and then tried to tie its back feet together so we could pin it to the floor. However, it kicked and struggled so much that it cut its own air supply and knocked itself unconscious! With that, we quickly spread its back legs with more ropes before Christian pulled out his goucho knife and swiftly chopped off the bull´s testicles.

The second bull could not have seen what happened (the lady cows all had front row seats) because it put up less of a struggle than the first beast. However, this meant it was still awake during the ´operation´, so I had to sit on its back to stop it from moving too much.

The whole process could not have taken more than 10 minutes, but they would never be the same again.

Christian then threw the balls (pictured with Lel below) to his two dogs, who scoffed them down, still warm and bloody.

On Saturday afternoon, we took the one bus of the day south for a couple of hours into the heart of Parque Nacional Los Alerces, a beautiful and remote national park which has some stunning lakes in a lush, mountenous setting. Having purchased a new tent that week in a little camping shop in Cholila, we were very excited to get into the wilderness and make camp at the side of Lago Verde. It was getting a little late by this point, with the light beginning to fade, so you can imagine our horror when we unpacked the tent for the first time to find that it was:

a) more akin to a wendy house than a tent;
b) incomplete; and
c) shit.

By the time we had finished erecting the tent, we had snapped off two peg loops so it was only secured by a single peg on one side and the cloud was threatening rain.

We ate a quick dinner, lit a fire to keep warm and put on all our clothes before being forced to retreat to the wendy house when it started to drizzle. It was a cold and largely sleepless night but thankfully, the rain ceased so we rose on Sunday to a fine morning.

Then, we set off on a short hike to Lago Menendez where we planned to catch a small boat across the lake to the valdivian rainforest and take a close-up look at the Alerces trees from which the park takes its name. These trees are incredibly old - some specimins are estimated to be around 4,000 years old (around twice as old as Jesus).

We arrived at the pontoon early at 10.30 and waited an hour until all the other passengers had arrived before being told that the boat was broken and the trip was cancelled. Argentine people do not understand the concept of passing on information.

So, with the rain again falling we hiked back to the campsite, dismantled our joke of a tent and went to a nearby hotel for afternoon tea. I have to say I did feel a lot better after taking-on an enormous tart.

With the rain looking set-in, we hiked back to the road to try and hitch a ride back to Cholila, something we thought would be easy. No. We hid in / under a tree for an hour and only three cars passed, none stopping.

Getting ever more soaked, we finally flagged down a Guardaparque (park warden) and hitched a ride to the office at the national park boundary. There we met three more Guardaparques who kindly stopped all of the traffic on the road until we were offered a lift from three fishermen from Mendoza.

As you can imagine, we were very relieved to get back to the farm, which was bathed in sunshine, crack open a couple of cold cervezas and stroke the dog (wearing his favourite hat below).

This is Miguel´s original ´67 Ford pickup.