Chile (Apr 2014)
Disclaimer: The following is an email I sent to friends and family in April 2014, preserved here for posterity.
Subj: Chile and Easter Island [Part 1: Chile]
It's been two months since you last read about my solo adventure in New Zealand where I pompously declared that volunteering is clearly the best way to travel (I'm such a travel hipster (...tripster?)). Since then I've volunteered in Chile and Easter Island, and now I'm in writing this from Uruguay where a great friend has decided to waste his vacation by volunteering with me for this month (I know, crazy, right?). Anyways, vamos arriba!
Chile
Easter morning I left Auckland, and many hours later but still Easter morning I landed in Santiago. A few hours later I had taken a bus down to Pelequen, a town most Chileans don't know, and walked up to the farm and met Ximena. She greeted me in Spanish and continued to give me the tour entirely in Spanish before asking if I could understand her. To which I wiggled my hand in front of me and replied "así así" - kind of. Apparently her daughter wrote the farm description in English, but Ximena doesn't speak or understand it. She had read and replied to my messages all via Google Translate. After a month on easy street in New Zealand, I finally had a challenge: speaking exclusively Spanish for an entire month with only a high-school-level understanding of it (and an American high school at that). It was difficult at first, but you'd be surprised how fast you can learn a second language when you can't speak your first. Looking back, I probably tripled my Spanish vocabulary while working there, thanks to the patience of Ximena and the full-time worker, Manuel.
As seen from the hill across the street.
The farm is a small vineyard, using huge ceramic jars and wooden casks to make a few thousand liters of artisanal wine. Unfortunately, the last four years have been exceptionally dry in her valley, and the competition is focusing on efficiency and consistency and millions of liters of wine (think Castillero del Diablo). For this reason, she is converting her farm into an "eco tourism attraction," charging students by the bus load to come pet the goats and feed the pig and learn what lettuce looks like and how to make their own bread and whatnot.
My job was to keep the animals alive and help Manuel with various projects around the farm. I gave food and water to the: 2 dogs, 6 cats, 16 geese, 3 goats, 1 pig, and 30 chickens.
Not pictured: pig.
Highlights:
Manuel, the full time worker, invited me to his son's wedding my first weekend. I tried not to draw too much attention away from the happy couple, but being the only gringo, and having dancing skills I just can't hide made it difficult to keep a low profile. I learned the Cueca (a very traditional Chilean dance that imitates mating chickens) and danced the night away.
Future dance partners
Woo! Shake that handkerchief!
Another weekend I headed up to Valparaíso (after the big fire and earthquake, if you heard about those) and had a great time pretending to be a tourist. I learned how good my Spanish was when talking to other gringos in the hostel who were just clueless. The city is full of awesome graffiti and incredible views and has an attitude of "shut up, I'm not perfect but I'm beautiful."
"Through guts and effort, this hill and I are like a fingernail and the dirt underneath it" Valparaiso is founded on hills, and the residents are attached physically and emotionally.
Chorrillana: A traditional Chilean dish that Americans would love. French fries, meat, onions, eggs, and cheese.
It might be revealing that all the best stories about the winery are about when I left the farm. I don't get to choose the life that I step into, and in this case, it was the life of a single mother who is taking care of her lovely mother with Alzheimer's and visiting her daughter weekly who is in a hospital 4 hours away for her recently diagnosed Crohn's disease. My host had her hands full, to say the least. Fortunately, I had been volunteering for long enough that I was mostly self sufficient, which she appreciated. It also gave Manuel and I the chance to become good friends.
My last weekend Manuel wanted to make sure I knew the Pelequen region before I left. We spent the morning touring a nearby granite quarry, then a furniture factory, and finally a broom master.
They're "Makers"
In the evening he invited me to a big BBQ he was having because his cousin is a trucker and just got back from Brazil with a bunch of cheap meat. No sauces or spices, just meat, salt, and fire. We stood around and picked the meat off the hand-made grill and drank cheap wine. I didn't know it then, but this simple and delicious way to cook meat was also a popular recipe in ...
[continued in next post: Easter Island]