Nov 14 to 16 we took a long weekend and went to visit the campo of Juan´s family. It is a massive, working soybean and similar crop farm but we went during the quiet time of year well after harvest, for a bit of rest and relaxation. As Carly is the scribe and I the photographer here is what she had to report on the weekend. Pictures will follow shortly.
¨We left on Saturday morning for the farm. It was a four hour drive and Pedro wanted us to set off at 6am as his mum had been worried about driving at night because he had originally wanted to set off on Friday night. His mum sounds like mine.
It took a little longer than four hours but we slept most of the way. Erin and I took pillows from the house to sleep in the back of the car and Juan sat up at the front (stealing Erin’s pillow when he could). Pedro listened to really loud and sometimes, really crap reggae all the way. He loves Brazillian style music which I have to say my ears have not got used to yet. This was probably the only car ride where I have not been able to get to sleep. Erin and Juan had no problems though. I spent most of the journey looking out of the window at the landscape. Most of the countryside is flat farmland with a few trees here and there. No mountains. No hills. Just yellow and green fields for hundreds of miles.
We arrived at the farm. We turned off the main road onto a smaller one until we arrived at a large track. We turned down the track and drove until we saw a white fence which we waited outside until the girl who lives in the house on the other side of the gate came to open the padlock so that we could pass through. We drove down another smaller tree lined track studded with huge old knotted trunked trees inhabited by small, brown, eagle like birds.
The house (when we reached it) is like a whitewash colonial style building with a round tower in the middle. It is surrounded by fields and gardens, one of the fields at the back is a home for the sheep and one of the other more shady fields is covered with domed white tents that protect the tens of types of vegetable and fruit growing there. The garden is speckeled with different types of trees. Some just flowers, some fig, some lemon and more of the great big ones that line the drive, each of them decorated with at least a couple of hefty sawn off stumps.
There is a tennis court in view of the house with a pool and a big pool house with tables and lounger chairs outside. The pool (which I walked over to check as soon as we got there) was filthy as they were waiting to drain it so that it could be painted. It was about 11am and really hot so I was really dissapointed about that. Pedro and I sulked for a good couple of minutes. There were about ten bedrooms to choose from so I picked one at the front of the house with a view of the garden and good thick blinds.
We spent most of the weekend not doing much at all apart from lay around in hammocks reading, playing tennis and eating lots. There is a cook that lives in the house so every morning we would get woken up to a huge breakfast (that sometimes included steak!) vegetable tarts, bread, bananas, honey, jam, tea, sausages… We got called in from playing tennis for lunch which was usually steak, tarts, bread, salad, stuffed vegetables and maybe strawberries with cream and pancakes then again have a break from playing pool or darts to have dinner which was melianaise (kind of breaded steak or meat) and salad or canelloni with vegetables and apple cake. This was all inbetween picknicks we made with crisps, cold melianaise, mate, crackers, fruit and pancakes.
Juan had a quad bike that he used to get around the farm in (go back and forth from the tennis court to the house). One afternoon I was talking a walk around the back of the house to see the sheep when I bumped into Pedro who was walking out the back door. The quad bike was parked inbetween us. We were thinking the same thing. Jumping on the bike (Pedro got me to drive) we set off to go and find the lake.
Driving down the tree lined drive past the sheep enclosure with the wind flapping through my hair, the sun on my face I was loving life. Squeezing the accelerator pedal with my right hand so that we were going around 15 miles per hour we were having a great time. We turned around a corner out onto the farm. The track we were driving down was surrounded by flat feilds grazing cows on one side and long lines of baby soya plants (one of Argentina’s most popular plant on farms due to the lucrative market) on the other. A barbed wire fence seperated the track from the fields, dividing the fields. The track was slightly raised with a small ditch on either side, sometimes holding muddy pooled water. The dirt track had worn away on either side to dust where the wheels of trucks and cars passed and had started to grow untamed grass like a green punk mohican down the middle. By this time we were quite a walk away from the farm and we were beginning to wish we had brought some water with us as the air was hot and the quad was kicking up dust from the floor.
I started to feel the grass mohican pulling on the bottom of the quad. Thinking that it might be a good idea to slow down a little, I pulled on the brake slightly and went to move to the left side of the track where the grass subsided. As I did this I realised about half way that I was probably making a mistake. The quad’s wheel doesn’t have the quickest reactions and is rather on the heavy side. I could hear Pedro behind me shouting ‘turn! turn!’. I tried to turn back to the middle of the track but by now the quad was firmly on its way down into the ditch and towards the barbed wire fence. In a last ditch (pun intended) attempt at steering I swung the wheel to the left, trying to hit the fence head on in order to stop the quad. I think I might have been shouting ‘Oh my god!’ pretty loudly at this point when I realised what was going to happen.
The quad hit the fence head on and threw Pedro and I into the air. I went sailing over to the right, managing to clear my legs from the path of the quad which I could feel tipping over onto it’s side towards me. I hit the hard dirt floor with a really good ‘thud’ and panting, looked over towards Pedro who was shuffling over the dirt on his side towards me to see if I was ok. After checking we were both alright (I though I was fine as I couldn’t feel the bruises or cuts from the shock) we examined the state of the quad. Thankfully there was not much damage to the fence or the bike and we managed (after several attempts) to push the bike the correct way around and reverse it back onto the path. We noticed that had we gone any firther into the fence we woulod have landed right on top of a huge ant nest. The ants were going crazy evacuating their home after the commotion. We must have scared the crap out of them. I scared the crap out of myself.
Finally recovering we went to drive back to the farm…promising each other not to tell Juan what had happened. I am not sure if this was more out of being embarassed that we crashed or because we were worried about what he would say about the quad.¨
