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.

el Gran Bio and more!!!!

Hello at last! What an incredible few weeks! Sorry for such a long delay between posts, but the few brief moments of internet access in the last month have found me too hurried and overwhelmed to try to distill what I´ve been living these days.
So first off, Bioconstruyendo Patagonia took place. For the fist half of February our numbers went growing on the farm until the magic week of the 15th arrived and we were more than 100 camping, eating, dancing, and building together in the blessed valley of the Rio Azul. Basically for me it involved 6 days of waking up in the cabin in the woods to the sound of flute music, eating 3 amazing meals a day, managing the irrigation system and weeding in the garden a but apart from all the construction madness, helping with herb and vegetable harvest for the kitchen, which converted into a mass production to feed everyone, and then huge fires and music every night. I met so many amazing human beings from el Bolsón, from Chile, Buenos Aires, even Colombia and Ecuador. So many great conversations about change and massage circles and collective silliness. And did I mention music?? Every day during the siesta, after dinner, and often to the wee hours of the morning playing tunes from the US, from Argentina, Brazil, and dancing like mad. One night a troupe of African drummers came and we had a massive dance and song to greet the moon as it rose over the mountain. I had a great time with a couple of slick guitar players, one from Neuquen, one from Chile who taught me a ton of tunes, and finally allowed me to dance folclore because before I was the only one who could play the tunes.
Anyway, so that was that. The last two and a half weeks on the farm have been a sort of slow recovery process. Every day a handful of people left and some arrived anew. We´re finally down to more or less 12 in all plus different visitors. The food continues to be amazing, though dangerously so. Wednesday for example after the CSA harvest we made an American style breakfast- fried eggs, hash browns, blackberry cobbler (did I mention that the valley is now literally flooded with wild blackberries). Anyway, it was so good that I stuffed myself even more than usual and spent the next 24 hours with stomach cramps and horrendous gas. Ahh, just the reminder I needed to go back to eating lightly.
Tuesday night was quite the adventure. So in the region of el Bolsón the winter are wet but the summers can get very dry and with brush and pine trees that means forest fires are common. It hadn´t rained for about three weeks and the dust was getting really thick. Then on Monday a fire started at the other end of the valley. We could see the plume of smoke just like a cumulus cloud on the horizon. The next morning it seemed to have died down when all of a sudden we got news that it had started up and had crossed the highway. Pastor, one of the main organizers of Bio who has a house near the fire came and asked for help, so about 10 of us loaded into his truck, some inside, some in the trailer, and rushed off in the late afternoon. We arrived as it was getting dark and found that the fire was raging in the valley right below his house. Let´s just say it was an impressive sight to see flames 50 feet high advancing through a valley. We had planned to dig trenches and cut down some trees but with such a blaze and with the wind coming our way we got pretty panicked and just ended up loading some expensive machinery and high tailing it back to town. On the way back we had to take an alternative route higher up the mountain because the gendarmes had blocked the route. In the end his house escaped the fire just barely because the next morning a glorious rain came and soaked the valley, but it did an amazing amount of damage across the way. That night, looking down at the lines of flames lighting up the night, smelling the pine smoke, rushing to load up the truck, . . . it was like a vision of the apocalype. Funny how much we talk on the farm about how soon the way of life we´re trying to advance will become urgent in the face of ecological disaster, it felt terribly appropriate.
Ahh, well that´s some of the many highlights of my time. More will have to wait for some other occassion. Other than that, this is a time of figuring out plans. As much as I love the farm, I feel weary of so much coming and going, so many goodbyes, and I feel like it´s time to move on soon. I´m in contact with farms in the south of Chile and hoping to be traveling that way in the next couple weeks. In the meantime, tomorrow is Alex´s birthday party (he´s the permanent resident on the farm) and it is sure to be full of music and madness. Afterward I may be able to meet up with none other than Steve and maybe spend some days climbing and sleeping in high mountain refugios. Time will tell. As for Carolina, she´s back in Mendoza and I´ll probably head that way to see various people by April. Our separation ended up very natural with so many great people coming to the farm. We both lost ourselves in new love interests and were very content.
Ahh to be free with a wide world waiting!
I apologize for the lack of pictures of me. It will take time to track down different people on facebook. For now, here´s three photos to give you a taste of my environment. One is a meeting during Bio (I´m in it, but it´s hard to tell), another of Alex in the garden, my second home, and the last of one of the best spots to take a dip in our beloved Rio Azul.
Until the next adventure!!