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Hi again! Well, here we are as promised, more adventures continuing from our last post:
The next day we got up after about 4 hours sleep and made our way again to Montevideo's bus terminal, where we were to begin our trip into the heartland of Uruguay. We were headed for Tacuarembó - real Gaucho country - where it is perfectly normal to see South America's version of the cowboy trotting on horseback through the main street in town, dressed in riding boots, poncho and beret. After arriving in Tacuarembó, we waited at the bus terminal for an hour or so before being collected by Juan, our host at a very unique hostel named Panagea. It was here that we had arranged to stay on Juan's working estancia (ranch) about an hour outside of the nearest town. Here, we were to live life like the Gauchos for the next five days, without modern comforts (including electricity) alongside four others; Louis from Britain and Davina, Kathrina and Sinead from Ireland. After driving altogether through the dark and rain, we arrived at the estancia where we found waiting for us the most wonderful home cooked meal we had had since leaving home some four months earlier, all prepared by Juan's wife Susanne. We soon discovered over the next few days, that Susanne's cooking (which included wonderful breakfasts with homemade bread, and jams, as well as hot lunches and dinners) was so amazing it was sure to ruin our palates for the rest of our trip! After all getting acquainted over our tasty meal, we had an early night and prepared ourselves for the next days work of shepherding and cattle mustering!
We started our first full day by learning the ropes in how to tack up and handle our horses. Juan gave us lots of great, practical advice on riding that could make the difference between a good ride or a bad one (such as to stop the horse pull the reins!) and we were soon on our way. We spent a few minutes adjusting to our horses (I, with little to no riding experience was given 'the slowest horse in latin america'!) and were soon enough quite comfortable with our steeds. We set off away from the stables and made our way across a couple of paddocks where we began our first task - rounding up a couple of hundred sheep and moving them from one field to another. This all went quite well, with the fluffy little clouds moving almost exactly where we wanted (admittedly with Juan and his incredibly intelligent dogs doing most of the leg work!) and our first try at gaucho work went without a hitch. Later that day, we moved things up a notch to herd a few dozen cattle back to the house for weighing. We discovered that they were slightly more difficult to move than sheep, but after a couple of goes we managed to get them moving mostly where we wanted. Once at the weighing area, we all organized ourselves into a system that would keep the cattle moving as quickly past the scales in order to keep them from getting spooked by being in a confined space for too long. Again this went quite well, but a small problem arose when we jumped back on our horses to move the cattle back to their pasture. On mounting Tormenta (my horse for the afternoon), I (Ryan) grazed Tormenta's rump with my back foot and he took off while I was half way over. This resulted in a small tumble at slow speed which left me a little dazed, but also with a valuable lesson for the next few days riding - mount cleanly! Later, we watched an awful movie called Trans Siberian (a generator was switched on every night from 6:30 to 9:30 - no longer, without exception! - so we spent most evenings watching a DVD from Juan's enormous DVD collection), had another fantastic, hearty dinner and went to bed, a little bruised, but eager to go out again the next day.
On the morning of day two, we were left to ourselves to go for a free ride, as Juan had to go to another estancia and do some veterinarian work (cow pregnancy tests!). We had been told the previous day that at any time we could go off riding anywhere on the ranch (a somewhat daunting prospect considering it spanned thousands of acres), so we all set off in a direction which Juan had suggested earlier. We rode for an hour or so away from the ranch, but discovered that when the boss was away, the horses were a little more reluctant to do our bidding. They proved in some situations quite stubborn - at times we had to give them little kicks just to keep them walking! At one point, Hayley even had a little spill, but we discovered that once we turned our horses around to head back home, they needed very little encouragement to go with some speed, trotting back for most of the way - clever, clever beasts!
One of my favourite moments that didn't involve work on the ranch happened just after lunchtime and Juan's return to the ranch. A quick word about Juan - you can chat with him about pretty much anything, he speaks perfects English (subscribes to English editions of Newsweek and National Geographic) and is generally just a well traveled and knowledgeable guy. In addition to this, he has this great knack of creating a feeling of familiarity between himself and his guests from the minute you meet him. Now, back to my favourite moment. I was enjoying a post-lunch beverage of mate (mentioned in earlier blogs, for more info, click on this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerba_mate ), when Juan came in the house and we all started chatting. On spotting my mate gourd, he exclaimed "Oh you like mate!", to which I replied, "Yes, but only with sugar". Without a moment's hesitation, Juan fired back, "Oh, only gays and Argentineans take sugar in their mate" which after a brief pause from myself (largely from trying to figure out which category I fell into) left everyone in the room in stitches.
Later, after finishing my sugary, sugary mate, we headed out to work with Juan to herd up some bulls for de-horning. The round up went quite well, and I certainly felt more confident in the work, feeling comfortable enough to chase after cattle which had strayed from the pack and generally felt at ease controlling my horse. We had even managed to pick up some scary noises Juan used to keep the stock in line - lots of 'Hooos!', 'Pffffts!', whistles and cries of 'Vamos!' (Let's go!). Once we had mustered the bulls into their pen, Juan and another gaucho who works on the farm set about their task. A gruesome looking business- horn removal! For the big horns the gaucho secured the bull with a rope around the neck while Juan took them off with a hacksaw, and for the little horns, a set of what looked like enormous bolt cutters were used. The distressed groans of the beasts and the cartoon-ish squirts of blood coming from where-their-horns-used-to-be was a little disturbing, but knowing that the procedure was painless for the animals, and also that left alone, the horns could themselves cause injury or death to the cattle and horses made the task much more bearable to watch. At one point, things turned semi-comical when standing about a metre away from the run, I was squirted with a long distance jet of bright red liquid - all over my boots, pants and jacket, much to the amusement of everyone watching. The dogs were my best friends for the rest of the day.
We spent the next few days (when not lounging around, reading, playing cards, badminton or randomly bursting into hysterics at newly developed in-jokes) at various tasks, more sheep and cattle herding, sheep-wrestling (absolutely as fun as it sounds - separating those with tails from those without tails pretty much through brute force- one arm round the sheeps belly, another round its neck and chucking/walking it into the right pen. Louis even recovered a tailed sheep which accidentally escaped into the non tailed bunch! No sheep were hurt in this procedure!) and spent our last day on a long ride around the perimeter of the estancia, me on my favourite horse, Alison, feeling very, very sad that the best 5 days of our trip so far was about to come to an end. We spent that evening watching one last DVD, swapping travel tips and savoring what we all knew was probably to be the best and last home cooked meal of our travels.
We left at around 10:30 the next morning, and said our very sad and reluctant goodbyes to Panagea (it's easy to see why they put a limit on how long they let you stay there!), Juan and Susanne, and also the Irish girls without whose company our stay would not have been the same. Some of the best fun we had included chats and relaxation time with not only our fellow backpackers, but also with Juan and Susanne who made us feel at home from the second we stepped in the door. Although we were sad to be leaving, I think that we all knew that if we happened to be within at least thousand miles of Panagea at any point in the future, we would definitely be making a return visit! So, on leaving the ranch, our task had turned to getting to our next destination - Salto. A Uruguayan town on the border of Argentina, Salto lay only some 190kms to the west of Panagea, normally a short easy bus ride, but there was one small problem… we were in the middle of nowhere with no buses remotely close to us. So, for that reason, we had decided to do something we would under normal circumstances not do, and attempt to hitch a ride to our destination. Accompanied by our new friend Louis, the three of us stood at the main road nearest to Panagea, stuck out our thumbs and waited. It was only about 10 minutes before our first ride came along, a man who worked for Antel, the country's phone company. He took us around 20kms towards our destination, a spot directly opposite a still under construction enormous phone tower in the middle of nowhere. Here we only had to wait another 15 minutes or so for our next ride, this time a mineral salts salesman from Montevideo who incredibly, spoke perfect English. This normally wouldn't have been that weird, except for the fact that we were in the middle of Uruguay, and in the middle of nowhere. He dropped us off outside an estancia about another 50kms down the highway, and out of a sense of concern for us, gave us his card and told us to go into the farm and call him if we got stuck - very nice, also quite funny, but I can see how our situation would look a little weird from his perspective!
There we had our longest wait, and while sitting by the side of the road, chatting about something very random, we distracted ourselves from hailing the next car that sped right past us. After cursing our lack of vigilance, contemplating the possibility of having to pitch Louis' tent in the adjacent field for the night and doing a mental stock take of the food in our backpacks, a big truck with a few road maintenance men in the back soon came to our rescue. We climbed in the back, and enjoyed possibly the strangest ride of our trip, chatting in our best Spanish to the workers (when we said we were from Australia we might as well have said we were from Mars they looked so incredulous!), and checking out their great set up of pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, lunch hanging on the wall (a rack of some kind of ex-animal) and watching the road fly by out the window behind us.
At the end of this ride we were over half way to our destination, and began sipping on some lunch (some cup of soups) when a ute drove past, seemingly ignoring our extended thumbs. Settling down to wait for a while, we spied returning from the opposite direction the same car that passed us a minute earlier. On hearing that they could take us all the way to Salto, between cheers, we threw out what was left of our lunch, and piled ourselves and our bags on board for a very smooth trip to Salto. On the way we did make a stop at a random ladies house for what was apparently 'el chorizo mas mejor en todo el pais' or 'the best sausage in the whole country'! One other strange moment half way during this ride - with Louis and I sitting in the back of the ute - came when Louis finished eating an apple and accidentally tossed his core out the back into the path of an oncoming bus. Ordinarily not very strange, but here on the possibly the most desolate highway in Uruguay, having not seen one vehicle pass in the other direction for some 30 minutes, we could not help but ponder the sheer randomness of this split-second occurrence. We arrived in Salto and checked-in to hostel before dark, congratulating ourselves later that night with a 'tenedor libre' (all-you-can-eat) dinner at a restaurant recommended by Juan, and had decided to go the next day to the local municipal hot springs.
The next morning we checked-out of our rooms, and walked one or two k's to the local hot springs. With a plethora of pools at varying temperatures. We spent a couple of hours relaxing here, just the remedy after a week of riding horses! Later we headed to the bus terminal and made our way back into Argentina and the town of Concordia, about an hour away. Here we got ourselves organized for our long overnight hall to what was to be one of the highlights of our trip so far - Iguazu Falls!
Once again bye for now and we'll be sure to write again soon. Make sure you check out the photos/videos section of the blog as well.
Lots of love
Ryan and Hayley
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