Patagonia SIN REPRESA

This place, where I´ll be living for the next few weeks, is for the most part untouched, wild and beautiful. There is a damn, which Luigi, one of my bosses, calls ironic, but the landscape is raw and Conservacion Patagonica has done a good job keeping it this way.

Yesterday was my first day of work on the estancia. Me, James, Jamie and Amy spent the morning and afternoon shoveling dirt into a ditch that sheep had made. Basically, we were helping to restore the land back to its original state. It felt so good to be shoveling dirt surrounded by snow-capped mountains, jagged rocks, rolling green hills, and of course a herd of llamas.

We moved out of the house and into our tents at lunch. I set mine up so I face a row of poplars, and above those, a snow-capped range. Toward the end of my first work day, around 430 pm, as antonia was driving last load of dirt to the ditch, the trailer hitch snapped, a clean break, leaving a trailer full of mud, grass and animal bones in the middle of the road. Several failed attempts to reconnect the trailer later, the crew wished him good luck and rode back to the estancia.

The workers figured something out - by the time we left the estancia to head into the town of Cochrane for beer and chocolate, the trailer had been reattached and driven back to the estancia. All in a days work on the estancia.