Way overdue post--El Bolson, The Mapuche, and lots of other exciting tidbits

This post is very outdated.  I started writing it about a month ago and didn´t have time to finish, but here it is.  I will write a new one as well.


So many things have happened since I last wrote a post.  It now feels as though our adventures have really begun since leaving Chile.  In the past month, we have worked at two different places, met so many amazing people, and learned a lot about a country and a people that have so much to teach us.  We have so much more to learn, and we are just about bursting at the seams with enthusiasm.  I know that probably sounds pretty geeky, but it´s true!

First of all, Argentina...What a country.  It´s natural beauty is astounding, at least where we have been so far.  When we first took the bus across the border to Los Antiguos, we were a bit disappointed.  As many border towns often are, this one was fairly lame, and we were given some false information at our super crappy hostel about when the bus left for our destination (a town called El Bolson) so we got stuck in Los Antiguos for an extra day.  When we finally were able to get on the 14 hour bus ride to El Bolson, we were itching to get out of there.  The only bus to El Bolson got in at 2 am, which we weren´t too excited about, but we had no choice.  Luckily the bus got in early, and around midnight we were dropped off on a random street corner in a town we had never been to with nowhere to stay.  We had been accustomed to being in the middle of nowhere, where it´s no big deal to throw a tent down wherever.  Now we found ourselves in an actual town, and we wandered around for a bit feeling lost and worried that we would not find a place to stay.  Fortunately, we found this amazing place where we spent a glorious few days beginning our relationship with a town and an area which is one of the coolest places I´ve ever been.  El Bolson is nestled in the valley of beautiful mountains, an area well suited to the cultivation of many things.  It has tons of fruit trees, vegetables, locally made beers, cheeses, jams, etc.  We were originally supposed to spend all of our time working for a group of Mapuche people who had recently reclaimed their land from the government.  Our contact to do this was a woman named Blanca Rosa, who is part of WWOOF.  El Bolson has an incredible craft market four times a week, and she told us to meet her there the following day and discuss plans.  When we met her, we were immediately taken with her.  She is about 70, and she was selling handmade windchimes made by one of her sons, and various medicinal plants from her garden, as well as home made teas.  She offered that we come and work for her for a bit before heading to work with the Mapuche people.  We gladly accepted her offer, and began an amazing two weeks with this very special woman.  We worked in the greenhouse, her massive garden, and even did various things around her house, like painting and construction.  I can´t really do her justice by describing her, but she is a firecracker of a woman who wanted to teach us all she could about plants, bioconstruction, Argentine politics, and a host of other things.  She runs a hostel as well as a WWOOF operation, in addition to being a local advocate and celebrity in the field of permaculture.  The local government consults her constantly on issues relating to the environment, because this is an area in which people actually care so much about how humans impact the environment.  It´s the kind of place where lots of people come to WWOOF, and then they decide to live there permanently.  We met an ex Wall Street banker who came to WWOOF after everything crashed, and now he lives in a Yurt in El Bolson.  Needless to say, we made some great friends staying at her place.

Next, we headed into the mountains to work for the Mapuche.  Again, the experience is hard to sum up, but I will try.  A friend we made at Blanca Rosa´s, who had just come from working with the Mapuche, had warned us that the situation was very disorganized and a bit frustrating, but very rewarding at the same time.  It proved to be such.  Basically, this large extended family has a piece of land in the moutains, surrounded by beautiful lakes and trees.  Rigth now, the land has one very rustic house-shack on it, in which the 85 year old matriarch of the family, Zoila, lives, sometimes alone, and sometimes with 19 year old Alexi, her great nephew.  Zoila is about four feet tall, with one eye, almost no hearing, and no teeth!  At first she was a bit intimidating because she gives something of a chilly reception, but by the end we were great buddies and she even gave me her shirt to take with me.  It was quite touching actually. 

Our main contacts, Elba, Zoila´s daughter, and Claudia, Elba´s daugther, would come every few days to work here and there, as would various other members of the family.  Our job was to set up living for future volunteers.  No one other than Blanca Rosa gave us any direction as to what to do.  Our first order of business was to make a shelter for our tent, because every night horses, cows and oxen would come onto the land, and we were told that they would trample us in our tent, which we got a brush with the first night.  It was a bit scary!  In that area, it is not an animal owner´s responsibility to contain his-her animals, but rather everyone else´s responsibility to keep other´s animals off.  Animals wander through the dirt roads all the time, and every night we were visited by animals in the night.  Luckily after the first night we had a shelter in the trees constructed to keep us safe.  Next we had to build a shack to do our cooking in, and to protect us from the rain and very intense wind.  We had only an ax, a hammer, a machete, and a very shitty saw to do so.  Various family members owned chain saws, but no one would leave one for us to use.  Things like this proved to be a bit frustrating, but we managed to construct a make shift structure that protected us more or less.  It took three days of rain to get us to get some proper walls up.  There´s nothing like getting soaked to put the fire under your ass!  Then we built, or rather rebuilt, an outhouse for our own use.  I never thought I´d be so excited to have access to an outhouse, but man, when we finished that thing, it was pretty darn exciting.  Our only way to bath at this place was to jump into a freezing cold lake (where talking Patagonian waters here), but the water was crystal clear and quite refreshing seeing as we were covered in dust at all times. 


In the end it ended up being a wonderful experience.  We met some incredible people and I for one refined my sawing and chopping with an ax skills...not really though.  I still stink at both, but I´m working on it!  They family had a big deep fried empanada lunch for us on the day before we left, and we got to meet some members of the extended family that we hadn´t met before.  We got more offers for long term work, which we passed up because we were committed to work in Mendoza (which subsequently didn´t end up happening, alas, but so it goes).  El Bolson and its surrounding areas were absolutely incredible and we wish we had spent more time there.  If you ever have the chance to go, GO!