Learning Goals

Last year, as this trip was taking shape, I realized that the central theme--the most important thread that was woven through all the ideas I had--was learning. Above all, I set out to learn about myself; having passed this far into my adult life, I had become acutely aware that I haven’t devoted nearly enough time to that exceptionally important undertaking.

Beyond that, I was, and am, as you know by now, very keen on learning, in essence, “how to do all the things that people have been doing for centuries,” but which most people don’t do for themselves anymore: producing their own food, building their homes, etc. And as the months have passed, I’ve been learning a ton about myself, without even trying, and I’ve found more and more things that I want to learn how to do.

At Rincon del Sur, the opportunities for learning are unavoidable. Since establishing herself and her family here ten or eleven years ago, Cynthia has dedicated each year of her life to studying some subject, with a mentor or in a formal course, that enhances or makes possible her homemade life. The first year, she wisely chose to apprentice with a veterinarian, learning all she needed to know about raising cows and sheep and poultry, etc Since then, she has done year-long studies in cheese making, bread and pastry, beer and liquor, apiculture (beekeeping), gardening and landscape architecture, and weaving, among others. Each day our activities are varied, and often they include one of these subjects, and if any of us express interest in something she knows, she readily offers to teach us.

Which brings me to the situation I find myself in now. Having come back to this lovely little farm in northern Patagonia, with a hostess and teacher whose goal it is to teach what she knows to those who want to learn, I’m feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities, and trying to carve out more of a focused period of study while I’m here. It’s been wonderful to learn a little bit about a lot of things while I’ve been here, but when planning my return to the farm, I knew that I wanted to have a bit more of a focus, either undertaking a project of my own and seeing it through, or dedicating myself to studying one or two things, beyond just a one afternoon introduction.

Little by little, my farm school study is taking shape. Inspired by my friend Darcy’s goal-setting activities, I’ve started making lists of the things I want to do, trying to prioritize and define each study by determining a desired number of sessions or lessons in each before I leave. So far, this is what I’m working on:

1) Breadmaking, 7 sessions: I’ve fallen in love with making bread. There’s something incredibly satisfying about kneading dough that has made me seriously consider enrolling in a professional baking school when I get back to the real world. We are blessed to have homemade bread every day, and each time it comes out of the oven, it’s a little miracle to me. I don’t even eat that much of it, but I could knead dough all day long. Normally, there are four of us partaking in the making process, but yesterday I was able to finagle a solo session, start to finish, and it was heaven. I’m hoping to make that a regular happening.

2) Driving lessons, 5 sessions: While not explicitly a farm activity, learning to drive stick is something I’ve wanted to learn for years, but which was put off due to lack of necessity, especially while living in New York City and essentially not needing to drive for five years. Down here, a car with an automatic gear shift virtually doesn’t exist--Nacho told me that only handicapped people drive them. I feel kind of handicapped, myself, being 27 years old and not knowing how, so Nacho has started giving me lessons. So far, I’ve had two, and it’s going pretty well, considering I have a deserted dirt road to practice on. I’ve set out a goal of five sessions before I leave. More would be great, as I know I’ll need more practice to really feel comfortable with it, but I don‘t want to take advantage of Nacho‘s generosity.

3) Weaving, 5 sessions: Cynthia has this beautiful table loom, on which she makes elaborate table runners, belts, pouches, and wall hangings, seemingly in no time. She’s begun teaching us how to use it, and it’s become another favorite of mine. I’ve rediscovered my love for yarn crafts, in general, and relearned how to crochet the other day, after many fits and starts, and a bit of research, and am trying to get the hang of spinning the wool we’ve spent our rainy afternoons cleaning. Again, weaving sessions are group sessions at this point, but I bought some yarn this weekend to start a project of my own, so I can get some more solo loom time.

In addition to these things, Cynthia wants to set up some hydroponic growing channels, and has enlisted me, with my one summer’s experience in hydroponic growing, to help her do it. We’ve done some research together, and I’m really excited about seeing this project through. Even if I’m gone by the time the lettuce is ready for harvest, I know I’ll get to see the pictures.

One of the difficulties in pursuing these activities here is that there are three or four of us, always, and most often we’re all interested in doing and learning everything. Cynthia already spends six hours a day with us, so I don’t like to take up her time or space during our midday break or in the evenings, although she is always very gracious about letting us stay longer to finish a baking or weaving project, or to use her wireless internet. She’s always very supportive of our own personal goals and interests, though, so I’m sure she’d be willing to work something out.

I’m trying to stay present and put my energy towards these efforts, as much as possible, but at the same time, I’m trying to figure out what’s up next for my adventures, with a tentative departure date from this farm set for mid-March. It’s looking like I’ll head to another farm, either in Argentina, or perhaps Brazil. I’ll be in touch about how that takes shape, and will put up some photos of my projects soon, too.

PS The photo at the top is just-baked "pan de leche" we made the other day in Cynthia's kitchen. Brioche-y goodness with pastry cream on top.

Folkdancing in Disney World

On my second night in Salta, I met up with a group of people for a social gathering organized through couch surfing.com, which is a network of people around the world who are looking for lodging on the couch or extra bed of a local, and those locals who have lodging to offer. Its also a way to meet people for a drink or a meal or an event, as we were doing that night. The group consisted of three folks from Salta--Alejandro, Valeria, and Leo, as well as Natalie, the British girl who had initiated the gathering, and Andres, a “Porteno,” or Buenos Aires resident, whom she had met on the bus. We met at a pena, which is a restaurant where customers spontaneously get up to play and sing folkloric music. It being a Sunday night, there wasn’t a whole lot of music happening, but it was fun to meet some local young folks, and Alejandro invited Natalie and I to stay at his house the following night.

When I arrived at Alejandro’s house the next evening, I found out that Natalie had just bought a bus ticket to Purmamarca, a tiny town that is the first along the Quebrada de Humahuaca, a popular route leading to the border with Bolivia, with small, traditional mountain towns set amidst dramatic desert landscape (although at this point, I had only just heard of this place, and didn’t know much about it, given my lack of travel guide). I had been wanting to go as well, so the following day (Tuesday), we set off on a four-hour bus ride to Jujuy, the northernmost province in Argentina.

I noticed part way through the bus ride that the bus was nearly full of 22-ish year-old Argentines, most likely from Buenos Aires. There weren’t any, as far as I could tell, foreign travelers, and very few older people. I thought it was interesting, as until now, I had run into young Argentine travelers, but also a good number of foreigners, as well. We arrived in Purmamarca, a town much too small to have its own bus terminal, rather dropping us off on the side of the road, and quickly found Andres, Natalie’s Porteno bus campanion, who had arrived the day before. He led us through narrow, unpaved roads, lined with low adobe buildings, to our hostel, a few blocks away. Even from this point, I could tell that the town consisted of about six blocks by six blocks, and it was then that I first noticed the stunning surroundings; dark red, and multi-colored rocky hills and rock formations rose up on all sides, providing a dramatic, panoramic backdrop for this tiny little village.

We dropped our bags at the hostel and went for a walk along a road surrounding the village. Every turn provided a new, breathtaking scene; the colors of the rocks seemed too vivid to be natural, and we stopped nearly every minute to take another picture.

While the natural beauty of the town was stunning, I was already beginning to feel a little bit unsure about other aspects of the town. Our busload of backpackers was only a portion of the total; the hippie Porteno set was everywhere throughout the town--playing hand drums in the plaza, passing around a cut-off soda bottle full of wine, sharing joints on the tops of various surrounding look-outs. I soon realized that they vastly outnumbered the “locals.”

“Local” was a relative term as well. In addition to the older, single-story adobe buildings built closer to the plaza, newer, more stylized versions made up the fringe of town, housing restaurants adorned with Andean “artesania,” and hotels with enclosed parking lots. Joaquin, the driver we hired to take us to the nearby salt flats, had grown up in Purmamarca. When Andres remarked how much the town had changed since he had been here ten years ago, Joaquin replied that the tourist boom had started around 2003. “What did people do for a living before that?“ I asked. “They used to farm the land, but by then, they couldn’t make a living anymore. They moved to the city, or to Mendoza, to work in the wine vineyards,” he said. Now, the plazas were lined with tables, piled high with “artesania,” some of it, like the thick, natural-dyed tapestries, obviously handmade and seemingly “traditional,” while other items, like the ubiquitous, brightly-colored, cheaper tapestries, bags, and llama-covered sweaters, seemed more likely to have been made in China.

That evening, we ate dinner at a local “pena,” a type of restaurant with live, often spontaneous entertainment, provided by guests or invited musicians who play Argentine folkloric music on guitars, a large, skin-covered drum played with a mallet, and/or a small, ukelele-esque 10-string guitar called a “charrango.” The band that played for us was great. They played a mixture of traditional songs with more contemporary ones, roused a few brave diners to get up and partake in a lesson in how to dance the traditional Argentine folkloric dance, and told us they were part of an artists’ collective from Buenos Aires.



I know my reaction is not unique, but I found myself struggling to free myself from it while I was there. Andres and Natalie didn’t seem to find fault with what I felt was a false and fetishized façade. Am I really so cynical? I asked myself more than once. After all, this town had seemingly been saved by tourism. I often thought about a similar high-altitude village in northern Chile where I lived for a week while studying abroad. It shared many characteristics with Purmamarca, but most of the thatched roofs of its adobe homes had caved in, long since abandoned by owners who had departed for the city. No more than fifty people lived there when I visited, most of them elderly. Purmamarca would certainly be suffering a similar fate by now, had it not been “discovered” by tourists, its isolation and stunning natural surroundings bolstering the appeal of whatever traditional culture still remained. Now, surely, its population had grown beyond what it had been before the agricultural economy declined. This was surely a good thing, no?

Clearly, also, what attracts us to places like Purmamarca is the opportunity to participate in, if only for a moment, a way of life that we deem to be authentic or traditional, untouched, for the most part, by the pollution of modern culture, which is largely inescapable for us. The week I spent in the village in northern Chile was the richest and most treasured time of my abroad experience. In other words, what we want is an insider’s view into the last remaining hold-outs of “traditional” life. We just don’t want to share it with anyone else.

After Purmamarca we traveled on to a larger town a bit farther north in the Quebrada, called Tilcara. It, too, had a plethora of hostels, tour operators, artesania, and young Portenos. Its bigger size diluted the tourist presence; it seemed to have a more stronger remaining local population and economy. I went along with Andres to the artisan market so he could buy some wall hangings to decorate his apartment. We went on a hike through that beautiful desert landscape to a nearby waterfall. That night, I even joined in at the bar when the hippies started dancing “folklorico.”

On being a bad tourist.

I just got back to the farm, after five weeks of exploring Argentina, with my sister, with my parents, and on my own. I saw some incredible landscapes, met some great people, and decided that I don’t really like traveling.

Hmmmm…okay, what do I mean by that? In essence, I’ve decided to “travel” for a year, and it’s been amazing. I guess what I mean, and what I’ve known for a while, is that I don’t like so much traveling from one place to another, snapping photos, swapping travel stories with other young backpackers at hostels, whose itineraries are inevitably some version of, “Yeah, we did Colombia, then Ecuador, then Peru, then Bolivia, then up to Brazil….” a finger tracing an imaginary map in the air in front of them.

I admit, being up north in Salta, some six or seven hours from the Bolivian border, I did have thoughts of just continuing on, taking advantage of my proximity to explore the Andean land to the north for a few more weeks. I do want to spend time there someday, maybe later on in my trip. But after one or two more towns, and as many hostels, I decided otherwise. I visited a lot of different places in my five weeks: Mendoza, Cordoba, Salta, Jujuy; but each of them seemed like just an introduction. I, like most of the travelers I met, spent just a few days in each place. Accordingly, I felt like I just got a taste of the place. I walked around each town or city, stopping in interesting looking shops or restaurants, visiting plazas and taking pictures of churches. I took some day trips to nearby hiking spots and waterfalls. But I never got to know any of the places, and, with each bus I boarded, was left with an unsolvable feeling of uneasiness; I didn’t want to stay longer and continue being a tourist, but nor did I feel like I had spent enough time there. I settled on deciding that I’d have to return someday, stay for a while, and really get to know it (I know that, in most cases, this probably won‘t happen, but it gave me peace to think it, anyway).

After spending two days in Cafayate, a beautiful little wine-making desert town four hours south of Salta, I headed to the nearest city to the south, bought a bus ticket for El Bolson, and began the long journey “home” to the farm.