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.