Tilcara, Jujuy: un dia de luz!

Hello hello!
Well it´s been two weeks in the extreme north of Argentina and a rich two weeks indeed. THe farm is gorgeous, moreso even than the photos (Aldealuna.com.ar) make it seem. It´s a long bumpy bus ride up into the yunga (semi-tropical mountains) and the farm has gardens on huge terraces where we cultivate everything from chard to corn to squash to peas. It´s pretty chilly, especially when there´s no sun because even though the rainy season is over, it´s always misty moisty. Imagine the climate around Macchu Picchu. That´s the idea. Overall I´m pretty satisfied with the people, though not as wonderful as my previous sites in Chile. A family from Buenos Aires that are a little cold and critical, but we still chat about things and joke and they´ve lent me books from great Argentine short story authors. Most English speaking than I´d like becuase of the German and French volunteers, but I also get to practice my Portuguese with the Brazilian brothers, so it´s all good.
Still, two weeks of hard work, getting up at dawn, eating huge meals of rice and polenta and huge salads and homemade soy burgers, had me a little worn down and really feeling ready to be back in Missouri already, especially after reading a bunch of National Geographic articles about the Midwest.
Then came today. A golden day by all means. Yesterday I came back to the city for the first time in 2 weeks. Jujuy itself is a pretty dirty city with lots of traffic, loud cumbia, and usually damp, cloudy weather. But today I decided to take my Sunday off to venture north and get to know the province a little better. I took the hour and a half bus ride to Tilcara, a little hippy town and site of a reconstructed indigenous fortress. First off, the change of climate is amazing. 20 minutes out of Jujuy city and suddenly the clouds and thick vegetation give way to a ride open plateau of desert, brilliant blue sky, and amazing mountains with sparse vegetation but rock formations like you wouldn´t believe and minerals of a bunch of shades of purple, orange, etc. (most famous is the Cerro de los Siete Colores). Then I arrive in Tilcara and begin a golden day. First, I go through the huge sunday market looking for a charango for Zora. I finally reach the stand at the end, then one place where they´re sold and it´s closed!! I was about to pull my hair out, but I talked to a yound woman at a nearby stand who knew the woman who sold charangos. She called her and she came and opened the stand and there I found a perfect one for just 500 pesos witha case included. Then I got to talking to the woman from the other stand, a super cool hippie type from Bolivia, and told her I´d come back to hang out after seeing the ruins.
I climbed up to the ruins, which were beautiful, even if reconstructed with a bit of conjecture. Walls and houses of pure piled stones, with roofs make of cactus beams covered with dried mud. Wandering around, I ran into a pair of anthropology professors from Buenos Aires, with whom I chatted about US imperialism, and how these ruins were bs because they copied Macchu Picchu and that really the pre-Incan peoples who lived here were much more advanced and built with more adobe.
On the way down, beside a corral full of adorable llamas, I found a huge stand of untended grapes and harvested tons to take back to the Bolivian lady at the stand. We lounged and gorged ourselves on grapes and chatted until I decided to wander back toward the bus terminal, write this blog post, and now I´m headed back to Jujuy and my last week on the farm before a marathon week of travel back to the US of A. But what a golden day in the valley surrounded by sun and gorgeous carved peaks. Plus, I´ve been chewing coca leaves from the market and that adds to a sense of jittery excitement to be alive. And now I have a charango to play with for the next couple weeks.
So life is good, and hopefully the next two weeks will go smoothly as I rap up my wanderings around Sudamérica.
Hugs and looking forward to seeing everyone soon!!

honey! buses! craziness!

What´s new?
Well things are really starting to wind down on my travels: I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (but the tunnel is groovy). The last week in Quillota with Cata and crew was fantastic. More delicious fruit, more carpentry building the delux composting toilet. See photos below of us in the middle of the structure.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quillotatransicion/5708982800
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quillotatransicion/5708984006
It was an especially special weekend for music and healing. One night a few of us went up into the tower above the house- it was an hour of lights-out in solidarity against the dam project in southern Chile, the hidroaysen. There we spent hours singing and telling stories in the dark. Another night for the full moon we did a wonderful ceremony around the fire.
The best was the last day there. I spent that day at the house of a friend and neighbor of Cata who distills essential oils, is a master beekeeper, and fanatic of blues music. When he found out I had a banjo he was thrilled and invited us to distill a batch of Rosemary oil the next day. So we went and spent the morning harvesting and tending the fire of the distiller. Then in the afternoon he showed us his hives and in his workshop we sampled all the varieties of honey he had there. So spectacular! Honey from Rosemary, from Lavander, from Orange trees, avocados, and native forest. Then we played music on his guitar and dobros.
So everything cushy. Then I zoomed back to Mendoza and hurriedly visited friends, stored my stuff in Carolina´s house, visited Madre Tierra for a night, and hopped aboard a bus for 20 hours on the way to Jujuy!
And here I am now in the beautiful north of Argentina on my way to the farm Aldea Luna tomorrow morning.
Gotta go! More later!

¡represa ni cagando!

Oh my! How many things have occured in the past days. I suppose it´s easiest to just go chronologically.
So, let´s begin back in Rancagua. The festival was great. We played in a huge bar in the downtown just blocks from the central plaza where national hero Bernardo O´Higgins hid in a church from the Spaniards during the war for independence. The show went great. I did a half hour set with banjo and guitar preceded and followed by covers of Violeta Parra, zambas from Argentina, and a paya, which is a traditional musical poetry slam of sorts. Two payadores, a guitarrist, and a crazy harpist who came from Santiago and entertained us all weekend, faced off improvising whitty rhymes to insult each other in decima form. The place was super loud and it was strange to play with amplification, but people seemed interested in the tunes I played.
Anyway, so after days in Rancagua of copious music and cazuela (stew with meat, butternut squash, whole ears of corn, and hot peppers), I said goodbye to Javi and Daniela and headed north to Quillota to stay with my friend Catalina, who I met in el Bolson. Cata lives with her family in a huge beautiful adobe house in a valley where avocado plantations climb up the hills. She´s taking advantage of her parents land to do all sorts of permaculture projects. Right now, the focus is the building of an Eco-School in the backyard with adobe and recycled bottles, and each weekend friends come from Valparaiso and Santiago to help. Wonderful youngins, all of them. Sunday was spent singing endless songs around the dinner table. The last week, in that sense, has been pretty cushy. I did a lot of work planting trees and cutting planks and such, but I´ve really felt like the gardener in a colonial mansion, surrounded by abundant fruit trees: grapes, apples, caqui, figs, feijao, . . . ahhh! At the same time, I´ve had a cold for most of the week and the endless noseblowing has put a bit of a amper on things, but with all the fruit and crunchy food and medicinal herbs, it´s the best place I could choose to get sick.
Then things got really interesting yesterday. I went to visit my friend Federico in Valparaiso, the San Francisco of South America. Fede has been living there the last few in different squatter houses and giving permaculture classes, studying pirate radio techniques, and selling empanadas in the street to save up money to travel to Brazil to study with Via Campesina. Anyway, he gave me the address of the house where he´s living with three other anarquist types and the password "arriba!" to yell, and I actually found it and there he was in the window. The house was in decent shape considering it had been long abandoned. Four stories, a solid roof, and they´d set up hoses to tap into the neighbors water line and electricity. We had lunch and mate there and went to another anarquist center where we co-taught a class on companion planting. I was pretty out of it at that point with my cold and the smoggy misty air that rises up from the bay into the ramshackle neighborhoods on the hills of the city. But we finished early so we could make it to a protest in the main avenue in front of congress against the approval of a hydroelectric dam (just another of many such projects) to be built by a British multinational in Patagonia which would flood many people´homes, destroy a beautiful river, and all in the name of supplying power to the dirty mining industry in the north. Bullshit!!
Anyway, we come down into the downtown in fornt of congress and what do we see. Pacos pacos pacos!! ("paco" is the derogatory term for the repressive Chilean police). Hundreds of protesters came marching down the main street singing and playing drums and chanting against the dam and here come the pacos with trucks shooting water cannons and tear gas. Some punk types throw rocks at the officers and scream insults. We retreated a bit to get around the police and get back to join the main group of peaceful marchers, but we ended up in the middle of the all too well known game of cat and mouse between the remaining protesters (mostly university kids) and the pacos. We disperse, regroup and start chanting again, then here come the water cannons, so everyone runs and then regroups. Not that anyone was in serious danger of harm, but nonetheless, we decided to get out of the action since it seem like the protest had lost its steam. We visited another big occupied house where some 20 or more squatters have a community kitchen and circus space in a huge building near the docks. We returned later to the plaza where people had regrouped and were playing music and dancing and chanting. At this point, with the protest no longer blocking traffic, the pacos where satisfied simply parked observing and filming the protest. We decided to head out and a friend of Fede, a sociology student, invited us to eat and we ended up staying up half the night eating and talking about the revolution and so forth. Good thing she didn´t have to get up early for class the next day since the whole sociology department is on strike for cheaper tuition.
Uff, so with my cold irritated, but my mind full of thoughts, I returned to the quiet country estate with Cata and family.
Oh, and add this to those thoughts: today I found out I got the Fulbright to spend the next year in Colombia! Holy crap! Didn`t see that coming! So now there´s lots of readjusting of plans and preparing to do. For now, I´m going to hang out and work here for another week while I figure those plans out.
Whew! And that´s all she wrote.

happy days!

Hello hello!
Oh boy, much has occurred in the last couple of weeks. In the last post you found me laboring hard on the farm of the Huenchuñir family. Tht was an enriching experience, and helped me think a lot of things through and lose some weight, and really get a genuine experience of a tiny rural area in Chile, but after 3 weeks, I was missing people my age, community, abundant fruit, etc. Fortunately, I found all these things in glorious abundance at my next stop, Parcelita del Espino, a farm in Cauquenes. The climate changed a lot: it´s a much dryer, semi-desert zone with tons of wine production. The farm where I was was the rural estate of the aunt of Manu, the leader of Espino, a huge area with sheep, turkeys, a vineyard with neglected 100-year old grape vines, tons of membrillo trees (pear-apples sort of), and tunas (cactus with a spiny fruit that tastes like honeydew on the inside). The atmosphere of work was much more relaxed. I was there with Ruben, an antisocial anarchist type who specialty is dirty jokes, and Manu´s aunt Cecilia, a crazy, fun 40-something strong woman who ran the farm for years all by herself before Manu and the permaculturists starting helping.
Basically, the week consisted of harvesting endless super sweet grapes, making wine pressed by hand, and playing tons of music over the weekend because they had a get-together and invited tons of friends who play music of all sorts. It was then that I met Javier and Daniela, aka el Quiltro y Charangüilla, a young couple who have dedicated themselves to immersion in the folk traditions of Chile, singing in poetic décimas, improvising, and visiting old musicians before they die and their traditions are lost. We hit it off right away and they invited me to play banjo and Irish tunes at a folk festival they´re holding tomorrow night in their home city of Rancagua, an hour south of Santiago. So here I am now, staying in their house in downtown, playing guitar, banjo, flute, guitarrón, charango, drums, and drnking tons of maté and fine chilean wines. Needless to say, life is good. The festival should be great. I´ll update soon to let you know how it goes. For now, things are great. On to Valparaíso in a few days to meet of with Federico at a occupued anarchist house and make plans for permaculture and activism.
Hasta el próximo episodio!!

Mapu Newen

A week and a half has passed on the farm of the family of Jaime and Angelica Huenchuñir, a Mapuche couple living and farming on a parcel of land in the community of Cañete, to the south of Concepción, Chile who have been recieving me gratiously as a volunteer-family member. Their style of life is a good bit different than Granja Valle Pintado or the hostel in Valdivia to say the least. The work is hard. In the last week we´ve harvested huge fields of potatoes with ox-drawn plow, beans, lupine for feed, and built terraces for the garden. Lots of back ache, long hours, but also work that lets you develop a rhythm and get lost in thought. I´ve done more reflection and brewing of ideas in the last week than the previous couple of months. The food is also different. Hot soup at virtually every meal, super spicy peppers, hot tea, mate, home-baked white bread, endless potatoes. Virtually all the food is from the farm: the potatoes, the beans, the eggs. Now and then Angelica kills a chicken and we feast on that. We harvest baclberries for jam, wild mushrooms for stew. The day a young neighbor showed up with a freshly shot rabit, which he generously offered, and even skinned and butchered it right there for us. In that sense it has been a wonderful experience of very direct survival off the land, unlike many farms or gardens I´ve worked on where you harvest a lot of greens and fruit, but the base of grains and oil and legumes and everything else is bought. It´s also more stark and realistic in terms of the landscape. Cañete is a pretty zone of rolling hills and close enough to the coast that you can hear the roar of the waves at night, but at the same time most of the landscape is scarred with huge pine and eucaplyptus plantations for miles around, with only tiny pockets of native forest around streams. Then for entertainment: for the most part the entertainment is the three children, especially the youngest, 2 year old Alén, who doesdn´t talk yet, but runs, dances to the radio, makes the most hilarious adult faces, plays hide and seek, chases the geese, etc. The television is on more than I wish, usually dishing out the tragically hilarious brand of sensationalist chilean ¨journalism¨ that involves camera capture of muggings, domestic quarrels, and, last night- just to give you a taste- a feature story about a bank robbing ring in Satiago headed by the 70 year old grannie who scopes out potential targets in the street. In that sense the farm is a game of contrasts. For example, the other night Jaime and I went to look for the oxen and cows down in the valley and they had escaped. We spent a couple hours wandering through trails of the pine plantation and thick blackberry thickets in the dark before giving up for another day. We returned from the pitch dark exhuasted and sat down to dinner with the kids watching Batman beat up Jack Nicholson-joker in the bell tower from Batman 1. Last week we had a minga for the potato harvest- that´s were you have a job like harvest or building something and you invite friends to share the work, and pay them in beer and wine and fried fish. I met some interesting buddies of Jaime, one who works in social development, and got my share of chatting about the revolution and what´s messed up. I talk about that a fair amount with Jaime as well, but he´s a much quieter, reserved type who has chosen to focus his energy on raising his children and enriching his soil rather than the confrontation with police and lumber barons that is the fate of Mapuches who want to be involved in activism. It seems every month another Mapuche youth has been shot or jailed or exiled for trying to stop the slow march of agribusiness, mines, dams, and loggers over Mapuche lands. Anyway. I´m well. Healthy. Eating more sparse portions. Working hard. Thinking and growing a lot. In another week, I plan to head a bit further north to another farm that has a more communal, hippy atmoshpere, but for now I´m living this to the full. Love to all!

una estadia revuelta

Oh boy. What a wild, absurd, enjoyable, frustrating, and everything else few weeks in Valdivia, Chile! So in the last post Steve and I were settling in at hostal Aires Buenos, me doing odd jobs, him designing a rocket stove, both getting fed and housed comfortably. It continued as such for the next week but I was starting to get restless. I got to do some garden work, but mostly it was the shit jobs: painting the hallway, cleaning the basement, hauling lumber and huge backpacks full of vegetables back from the market. Plus, while the city has its charms, the noisyness, the cars, and the ridiculous tourists above all were maiing me restless for a farm. Some examples of the clientelle of the hostel: Colin from New Zealand who looked exaaaactly like Mr. Bean, a couple of fratty types from Australia that repeateadly awoke us at night, stumbling in drunk and lovelorn and who despite having been in Chile for several months were so inept at Spanish that they had to ask what poco meant. A Danish fellow named Johny who was a fanatic of backgammon and bribed us to play it for hours with peach vodka. As if that weren´t entertaining enough, the last few days things really started to unravel into absurdity. A couple nights ago a loudmouth woman from London got bitten in the night and come to find her room was infested by bedbugs. We inspected it and found more and everyone started to get hysterical and paranoid. We ended up rigging up a pulley to lower the mattress and bedframe out a third story window so as not to transmit them further. Then the fumigators came and sprayed the room and didn´t seal it properly so we were all coughing and decided to get the hell out. The owner, Viella had been out with a friend the night before and had the epiphany that she wasn´t sure she wanted to keep the hostel or build more on her cabaña so she terminated Steve´s rocket stove project. She also finally decided she had to get rid of the semi-feral cat Pierre, an adorable little rascal- all black with a white moustache- because he was spreading fleas and biting guests that tried to pet him so we ended up grabbing him, sticking him in a bag and walking a few blocks to dump him at the fish market near the docks where he´ll hopefully live well alongside the hordes of sea lions that come up to feast on the discards of fish guts. Ahhh, what a glorious parade of absurdity!! But I exaggerate the bad for dramatic effect. Things have been pretty nice. Yesterday for examp`le we fled the fumigation to go up one last time to the cabin. We cut some wood, covered up cosntruction supplies, and then enjoyed the walk down on a glorious sunny day with tons of wild blackberries, rasberries, and murta berries (like red blueberries tha taste extra cedar-ish) and the view of the lowland swamps. Then we celebrated our last night by cooking fresh fish, green beans, and feasting with peanuts, chocolate, beer, wine, and good company. Or last weekend, I managed to sneak away to spend a few hours by the ocean and ended up writing a poem (I often forget that I write poems until I´m somewhere like next to the sea and one just pops out), and doing some good existential reflection. SO life is good, as it always is when you stop to think about it. And now I´m getting out of Valdivia, settling my restless bug. And what´s more, I´m headed five hours to the north to stay on the farm of a Mapuche family that just got back to me yesterday! I´m so excited! They have animals and berries, and are no doubt wonderful. I´ll be meeting them hopefully by this evening. On the road again!!! For the long term plans, things are starting to get clear: I´m going to travel up Chile, cross to Mendoza for a few weeks, head to northern Argentina to wrok on a wonderful farm-forest reverve called Aldea Luna (look it up). I´m going to accept Chapel Hill´s offer for grad school, and either start there in August, or get the Fulbright and defer for a year to live in Colombia. Either way, I should be back in Missouri for a little while as soon as July! So hugs for now. Stay tuned for the next round of adventures!!!

noches valdivianas

A change of scene!! I am entering week two in Valdivia, Chile, a bustling little city close to the coast, which I haven´t actually gotten to visit yet but hear it´s lovely. I´m here at a hostel with a garden and different permaculture projects called Aires Buenos. It´s run by a sassy older lady from California, working along with a nice, mild-mannered french couple and none other than my homeboy Steve!! The story is like this- I knew he was travelling in Patagonia, but didn´t expect to be able to meet up. Then my very last day at Granja Valle Pintado in the morning just as I had finished packing and was ready to take my last stroll and say goodbye here comes Steve ambling down the path. It turned out to be fortuitous because we called the lady at the hostel in Valdivia and she said it was ok for us both to come and work and so far it´s turned out well. We´re both working on projects at the hostel and for the woman´s cabin in the woods. Steve´s building a rocket stove for the cabin and I´ve been expanding the garden, and doing odd jobs like painting and cutting firewood for the long winter to come. The weather is rainy and chilly in the morning, but then sunny and nice. The garden is small but the yard has a generous pear tree, two chickens, and an absurd pet duck named Gardel who enjoys digging up transplanted herbs and hopping between my feet at all times. A lot of intolerable rich European tourists are around the hostel, but they feed us well and we sleep deeply in comfy dorm beds, so no complaints. Still, I´m ready to back in the countryside and eating farm food. I´m in contact with several farms in the area looking to spend the month on April before I return to Mendoza and then up to work on a nature reserve in northern Argentina in the lovely month of May.
The last two weeks in Bolson were nice. I had been really antsy about where to go next, but once I got the hostel gig lined up, all good. My farewell dinner was a suishi bonanza replete with super hot edamame powder on everything and then song after song around the kitchen table until late. The last few days were blustery and with less activity. Time enough to meditate, reflect, and have a brief fling with a pretty canadian girl who came to Argentina fleeing a life situation where she felt angry and entrapped, and as of yet hadn´t felt much better as a result of travelling. One of many complicated lives crossed with in 2 months at Valle Pintado. Then it was a goodbye to Patricia, my friend via Eduardo from Centro Latino and wonderfully generous host in her messy but love-filled home in el Bolson (6 dogs, 3 cats, underattended pear and apple trees, and her teenage son Antus was, well, a teenager in the fullest sense).
Now Valdivia seems so bustling compared to el Bolson. Cars, thousands of university students, lots of sly street people, fish markets. Oh, and did I mention blueberries? At laaaaast! So many blueberries at the market!!!
Last weekend I took a trip 5 hours north to visit my hermano Federico who I met on a farm in Mendoza, a poor, good hearted, super anti-dogma kid from a poor villa who like me dreams of the rural anarquist revolution. I visited him where he´s been living the last couple months at a little anarquist collective house with a big garden in a tiny town called Melipeuco near a volcano. A wonderful weekend of drking mate on the sidewalk, feasting on blackberries and apples planted all over the town, and talking about the new paradigm. On sundat afternoon we harvested a huge field of potatoes as a community and I learned a great new folk song from a Chilean girl. The other people at the community were super awesome and the walls we covered with great posters about resisting the bullshit and spreading joy and creativity. On the way back to Valdivia I got stuck in the bus terminal of Temuco with a 3 hour layover, but luckily it was on the outskirts of town so I walked across the way into a field, harvested more ubiquitous blackberries, sat and watched the moon rise wrapped in my rainjacket so as not to be devoured by mosquitoes, and then went back and red the copy of the declaration of the people´s climate conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia that Fede gave.
So yeah, things are a-ok in Valdivia. Doing odd jobs, helping Steve track down materials (yesterday we went to a funky old time brick factory where they fire clay in a big wood oven and then hung out in a bookstore where I found a Mapuche grammar book- go figure!!)
So that´s the good news. I´ll write more soon when I´m at home on the next farm.
Night night.