Belated post number 1

Am so behind with my posts that I now see that WordPress has changed it’s interface since I last used it!

Here’s a quick recap…

8 days ago I left the Estancia. Unlikely to return. All the guests had left, the season has finished and although it was a lot of fun, and I would guess I rode well over 60 different horses in the two months I was there, riding twice a day virtually every day, I don’t think it was the right place for me longer term. (That said Luis is now working more on the young horses every day, which is really interesting stuff).

I left on a Friday evening and had a reasonably early start on Saturday to go by bus to a village called Obispo Trejo about 3 north. Antonio (‘Tonio, Jose or Paco… depending on who you talk to, everyone out here has more than one name!) has a lot of family who live up in Trejo and we were going up to go to a Doma in a neighbouring village.

As it turned out the whole trip was far more interesting than the Doma (Doma being a Gaucho competition, where the men ride wild horses for as long as they can).

So we did the two bus ride, out of the hills of the Sierras Chicas (which was pretty much all I knew up until now) and into the flat agricultural lands of the Cordoba province. HUGE fields sown with maize, some alfalfa and a LOT of soya. Soya harvesting was going on and tackle shops (wonderful yards of farming machinery) were abundent. Tied along the fencing were advertising boards for the companies whose seeds were planted in the fields. Gorgeous warm sunny weather, dry and dusty once you get off the tarmacked roads, and you really get the feeling of the size of the country as you just keep on passing  more of the same crop planted fields.

Once in a while the bus takes a side road, a dusty track, and we do a little loop around a village. At one, otherwise unremarkable, loop we got off.   Obispo Trejo. This village has a grocers, butchers, couple of bakeries, an ice cream shop, centered around a main street, which is just a dust road really. There’s a bunch of houses.. mainly single story concrete block construction. But all have yards, washing lines and dogs.

Argentina has a lot of dogs.

A bit like Ecuador, you don’t see many cats, but dogs are everywhere. They’re the second race. They never go inside a house, but you see them trotting around, large towns or small villages just the same; going about their doggy business just like people. They generally look in good nick, although some of the street dogs have clearly had to fight their way to the top and others have been hit by cars.

We got off the bus and walked up a dirt track to a bunch of houses. No grand construction here. ‘Tonio’s sister Lily lives with her 3 daughers, and a son of a dead brother and daughter of a dead sister, in a two room house without hot water. They range in age from 5 to 15 (I didn’t ask where the father of Lily’s kids was). Lily is blind in one eye which weeps constantly.

TO BE CONTINUED…