Ranch

From the big city of Buenos Aires to a small town in the middle of Uruguay and the chance to spend a few days working on a ranch! All seems a bit bizarre but hey life moves quickly here! Arriving in the town of Tacuarembo at 6am when we weren't being picked up til 11 was a bit annoying especially as it was freezing! So we spent 5 hours huddled together in our sleeping bag liners trying to keep warm… think we looked a bit odd as we got lots of sympathetic smiles off of locals (no money though hmpf)! Finally got picked up in a big old truck and taken out into the countryside, the ranch was 2 hours out of town and had around 2,000 acres of land. The owner Juan who'd picked us up seemed really nice and there was also 2 other girls working there long term – Steffi from Germany and Anna from Switzerland. Having arrived at the ranch, an old rustic house with out any running water, heating or electricity (water from the outside well, log fire for heat, cooking and hot water, electricity by a wind powered generator that gives 3 hours a day) we soon settled in and was helping out with making lunch. Then it was straight into work, saddling up the horse – something I'd never done before, in fact I use to be a little tentative about going near a horse let alone to start strapping girths around their bellies and trying to put a bit in their mouths! It wasn't long before we were riding off into one of the many fields to round up a herd of cattle. Now being a vegetarian I wasn't quite sure how I'd feel about this, but it is part of South American life and it seemed like something we should sample while we were here. So there we were, Shona and I, 2 gauchos (Juan and Berlinga…sounds like a Brazilian footballer!) and Steffi (the German) chasing over 250 cows round a field and trying to move them. Once they were all safely together we started to herd them to an enclosure across a few fields and rivers trying to stop the odd wannabe escapee – having a couple of angry bulls staring at you on a horse as you block its escape route is a little scary!! Once they were all in the enclosure it was time to get amongst them…hang on it was scary enough on a horse and now you want me to stand with them!! We separated out the calves from the cows so that they could have a nose clip fixed to wean them from their mothers and be given a calcium injection. Then we herded them back to the fields. It was a fantastic first day and a great experience. That evening after a lukewarm shower (who didn't stoke the fire up enough then!) and a lovely candlelit dinner, sounds romantic but the generator hadn't kicked in yet we settled down in front of a roaring fire with a bottle of wine or 2 to all watch a movie – a very pleasant way to round off the day. The following morning we started off at 8am with the same procedure, saddle up the horses and head out into a different field, this time it was sheep – they were a lot easier to round up than the cows because as the saying goes the do actually just following one another like…well, like sheep! Once we had them in the pen out came a big knife, ok this could be interesting! Lambs separated from the sheep and it was either off with their tails if it was a girl or off with their balls if it was a boy (oh not with a knife for the balls, some weird special castrating clip!). It was all very unpleasant but necessary…and yes the blood from the tails did actually squirt like in a bad horror movie! In the afternoon it was yet more cows, this time an older herd that needed branding…ouch! The following day we woke up to rain and it turned out that cowboys don't work in the rain…result, back to bed then. We went out for a small walk around some of the ranch before lunch, it was such a cool place – river for kayaking, rock faces for climbing and more land than you could imagine! That afternoon it was back out on the horse but this time following Juan in a tractor, we headed off for one of the many small forests on the land the find some fire wood. Woke up bright and early on our final morning after another evening of wine and a film and just went out with Steffi and Anna for a nice ride, no rounding up animals just checking out the surrounds one last time before heading back to Tacuarembo and catching a bus via Montevideo to Buenos Aires and then on to Puerto Madryn for some whale watching yaaayyy!