August 2, 2013

The weekend brought lots of new friends to San Rafael. First, we had two new workawayers join us at Andeslands, Theresa (German) and Ernesto (Argentine). Followed by another workaway couple (from the UK and Latvia, both interior designers) who were joining another finca down the road.

We became fast friends with Theresa and Ernesto. Both having spent several months traveling already and incredible English, we immediately had lots to talk about and it made the painting we were doing around the house a lot more entertaining. But again, more ideas and possible outcomes to my destination delima.

August 4, 2013

Instead of our usual Sunday feast at the house, we took a little field trip to the canyon down the road. We hopped into the Hilux (the best beatup car I’ve ever met) and rode down to the corner shop in true San Rafael style, holding the doors shut and watching the hood rise and fall on the horizon. The guys returned to the truck with two large bottles of vino and some chorizo for a little picnic.

Having explored some of this area just a few weeks ago, we decided to take a different route. In the end it wasn’t as good as our first route, but I think it was probably a better set-up for our picnic and we still had a fairly decent view over the canyon and San Rafael.

Soo after downing a bottle of vino, eating some cacti, and trading some English vocab for some Spanish, we felt we should revisit the original route we took a few weeks back. We loaded back into the truck and hobbled down the road to find several locals having asados and enjoying the beautiful weather. We went straight for the hills and before too long we realized Brent had disappeared…. Only to reappear about 50 meters up the face of some rock. Typical. He was half way up and wanted more so the rest of us headed that direction in hopes of making contact with the half-monkey, half-man known as Brent Fink.

The scrambling commenced. Ernesto was the only one of us scragglers to make it to the top with Brent. Theresa and I got half way up, decided it was for the birds, and went for the wine instead.

After our intense scrambling around the canyon, we decided to see what our workaway friends down the road were up to. Unlike us, they were being productive and constructing and new pin for the goats and pigs on the farm. I like to think our good spirits convinced them to retire for the day because shortly thereafter we were all enjoying the wine together and watching the sun go down.

The drinking continued into the night until we were all drunk enough to wander out into the pasture to look at the stars and the Milky Way during a wind storm… It was during this stargazing that we realized we had had enough to call it a night and head home. We said our chaus and gave our besos and all agreed to meet up again on Friday for an asado.