Las pampas!

 

Today we travelled north of Buenos Aires on the Pan American highway for about 80 miles (we could have continued north and eventually end in Alaska, which would have taken a while but sounds cool!), out of the city in into the province of Buenos Aires - think Washington DC and Virginia - its a very similar status,  except the citizens of Buenos Aires city can vote for representatives, while people in DC cannot….

But I digress….  We were going to a horse farm in the pampas! When we drove from Puerto Natales to El Calafate, I mistakenly thought that we were driving through the pampas.  We were not, we were going through a large desert.  The pampas around Buenos Aires are very fertile land that, until the European arrived were covered with thick grasses - think the US prairie, minus the bisons.   This extremely rich soil was divided and given to Spanish farmers who became very rich and build all the fancy house in Buenos Aires.  Even today, the richest people are the landowners.  It is now covered with wheat, soy, cattle farms and horse farm.  There were no native trees, all the trees you see around Buenos Aires were imported.  

Of course, that involved displacing and killing whoever was there fist, and very few of the native population remains (about 1% of the total populations).  The ones that were not killed worked on the large estates and developed the gauchos culture.  Horses were new to them, but the developed a unique and very personal relationship with them, as well as a unique way of training them called “horse whispering”, more about that later.

We arrived at a beautiful estancia, run by a very large family:  the parents started it as a horse breeding farm, then added some guest rooms, and activities for visitors and a polo club.  They had 9 children (!!!!), 5 of whose run the farm and the polo club now.  

Today, the gaucho culture is no longer just the native people (for one thing, there are not enough of them left), but all the people who raise, run and breed horses.  So they put on a typical gaucho show for us, with races, games - including getting a very small ring on a stick on a horse a full gallop, which seems almost impossible to do, and yet, they did it.

The most impressive part of it though was the “horse whisperer”.  The native really took to the horses, and just related to them in a unique way -  they believed in a gentle approach (no bit in the moth for instance), and get the horse to do amazing things.  Here are just a couple of pictures, but they don’t really show how the horse and the gaucho related to each other.   It was amazing.

We had the typical asado meal - Argentinians eat a lot of meat!!!, accompanied by two very good guitar players and singers, playing Argentinian tune - including an old favorite of mine - my French friends will remember “je reviens” par Hughes Auffrey…

Then came back to the city early enough for a walk around the Recoleta neighborhood.  There is a very large craft fair every week end in the park and I strolled around.  There were lots of people, locals and tourists, some were just sitting in the park enjoying the beautiful weather, some strolling under the magnificent gum trees (I do love a huge grand tree!).  It was very enjoyable.  As I said, Buenos Aires is just a lovely city, and it feels very safe.  It is also really clean!  We are in a fancy neighborhood, and this is a city of 15 million people, so I’m sure it’s not that nice everywhere, but the large center is just great.  

The concierge at the hotel recommended that I go to the “El Ateneo” book store, which I thought was an odd recommendation - but, Buenos Aires is in fact famous for how many book stores it has and that one is just amazing!  It’s all in Spanish, so I did not buy anything, but it is well worth seing.

We had our good bye reception this evening.  One member of our group wrote a song about our trip, and performed it, which was lovely.

We fly home tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll have some time to walk around some more in the morning.